
Trashy article. FAIL!
Any discussion of Java should separate out the language from the VM.
This article fails to do so, so immediately makes it bogus.
The Java language is used to write Android apps (does the author hate those?), it's used to write GWT apps like the the Adwords web interface (not trivial), which is all coded in native java (but compiled to javascript).
However, if he wants to poke fun at the VM, he should remember that the VM runs countless backend applications like Jira and Confluence (fantastic products) and modified VMs run Google Appengine alongside python.
If he wants to write about how the Java VM failed to be productive inside the browser, he can write an article about that... but that's not an argument about Java.. and really demonstrates the failure of Sun.. A knowledgeable sysadmin should know better...