Java is ten years younger than Erlang. When Java was marketed into the new hot thing in 1996-1997 Erlang was widely used within Ericsson, and in 1997-1998 someone in Ericsson had swallowed the Sun bait and forced the start of a transition to Java. Joe Armstrong and others went to management and convinced them that since Erlang was now useless it should be released as free software, and it surprisingly was.
Which meant that some of them promptly resigned from their jobs and started a company doing freedom Erlang. It took until 2005 or so for Ericsson to confess that they had made a mistake in trying to Java all the things and got around to using Erlang again.
> it took until 2005 or so for Ericsson to confess that they had made a mistake
Impressive that someone was able to make that call and accept the situation, after investing half a decade moving to Java. Also says something about the staying power of Erlang and its paradigm, that the company was able to re-adopt it again.
Well, the IT bubble had burst and Sun was basically two thirds down the sewer at the time. Re-adopting something you had built and proven in the early days of cell phones probably looked like very reasonable risk management.
