No. Because making anything complex that works on many platforms is very hard work. Take a look at WhatsApp (recently bought by Apple for $19 billion).
.NET's C# and F# are actually the only choice. C# is old and at most slightly better than Java 8. F# is somewhat better (much more concise) but still behind Clojure, Scala, Frege, etc... I'll also want to mention here that IMO Clojure is now on the forefront of innovations actually implemented and widely used in enterprise class software. STM, async, channels, static types, transducers, etc... and all these things are so easy to use for a newcomer. Every other language have already copied something from it or is in the progress of doing it. When I'm programming in Clojure I can feel I can work miracles - things that are hard or almost impossible in other languages I can write in a few lines of CLojure. Brilliant language. I'd discovered it couple of years ago and I'm still shocked by its power.
JVM runs on wider range of hardware. JVM compiler is faster than .NET equivalent. JVM has more programming languages tagetting it. these languages have much more mature libraries. Some of them run on .NET, but almost none of the languages from .NET runs on JVM. JVM has many many more man years spent on libraries, so Java libraries are much more trustworthy. And so on...
JVM and Java are much more reliable. Java backwards compatibility beats .NET every time. How many .NET frameworks do you need to install if you need software written in different versions of .NET? Answer: all of them. And Java?: only one.
I've got 3 or 4 versions of .NET on my system because of this.
I agree, but what can I do. If you want larger client platforms coverage this "worse" becomes actually better.
I don't like WEB stack also, but HTML is the best x-platform GUI technology right now. Evey system has a web browser, but not everyone runs JVM, .NET or similar (or runs none of these - Android, BB, iPhone...).
"Java is no one's first choice for writing desktop UIs, whereas .NET is standard for business applications"
From my PoV neither Java nor .NET is the first choice for UI. HTML and JS is. Especially for large multi-million dollar software. I know what I'm talking about here. Yes, HTML&JS are bad and crap, but may times better than applets or desktop apps. Nobody likes vendor lock-in.
When it comes to server side .NET is much worse than JVM.
So now, you got the picture why Mincro$oft made this desperate move. Developers, developers, developers...