This was discussed in the Gossip section on JavaPosse’s podcast number 103, but unfortunately it looks like the website for the links they referred to has been taken down and/or password protected.
The guys in the podcast quoted from the documents that were publicly avaialable on the site, which gave an insight into Microsoft’s original goals to build a competitor to Java (J++?) that would beat Java at it’s own game by ignoring the cross-platform benefits and leveraging native platform support on Windows. J++ never caught on but may have been one stepping stone towards the development of .NET, which again borrows Java concepts (the Common Language Runtime = the Java Virtual Machine), but yet again, still has not made significant impact in the IT industry.