It's definitely a challenge trying to balance portability with support for platform specific features but I'd be a little hesitant to draw general conclusions from the two big examples since both Adobe and Sun were notoriously negligent platform maintainers addicted to haring off after some shiny whim before fixing what they had already built. Even simple things like if Sun cared about non-server performance in the 90s or if either of them had figured out how to properly package and ship updated before the 2010s could have improved their reputation immensely.