I'm in my late 30s, so I certainly remember the Microsoft and Netscape situation, and the antitrust case, from my later teenage years.
I think it is different now though. Microsoft was trying to leverage their near-monopoly on the desktop into a monopoly in new markets. Now, although Microsoft retains the bulk of desktop/laptop market share, desktops and laptops are not as significant as they once were. Microsoft's attempts at the tablet and phone markets were largely unsuccessful. A lot of apps that used to be desktop-based are now web-based. For desktop apps, cross-platform development solutions (e.g. Electron) are a lot more popular than they used to be. The alternatives to Windows on desktop/laptop (macOS, Linux, ChromeOS) are arguably more compelling and more practical than they used to be. Linux, not Windows, dominates in the server space. In cloud, Microsoft is stuck in second place position. The generation coming up through the school system right now is more familiar with Google Docs than Microsoft Office. Microsoft's language platform (.NET, C#, etc) has decent marketshare but competitors such as Java and Python are ahead.
So even if some people at Microsoft want to repeat Microsoft's EEE strategy from the 1990s, Microsoft doesn't really have the same foundation that it had in the 90s to make such a strategy successful. And that 90s strategy, even if it worked in the short to medium term, doesn't appear to have been a long-term success – Internet Explorer may have killed Netscape, but arguably Chrome has killed Edge. Microsoft's attempts to EEE Java likewise failed – Visual J++ and J# are history, and Java is still more popular than .Net/C#.
Ahead in terms of features, or ahead in terms of market share? I wasn't thinking of the former, more the later.
Which one is ahead in features is debatable. Certainly C# has some goodies which Java lacks, but more recently Java has been catching up.
Which one is ahead in marketshare/mindshare/ecosystem – I think Java is the clear winner here. In part because, despite Oracle's overall ownership, Java gets a lot of attention from other big vendors such as IBM and SAP and Google (putting to one side all the regrettable Oracle-Google legal issues), and a lot of focus from the open source community. By contrast, .Net is basically just Microsoft plus a boatload of small-to-medium vendors, and the .Net open source community has always been smaller than the Java open source community.
(Obligatory disclaimer: I used to work for Oracle, although not directly on Java.)
I think it is different now though. Microsoft was trying to leverage their near-monopoly on the desktop into a monopoly in new markets. Now, although Microsoft retains the bulk of desktop/laptop market share, desktops and laptops are not as significant as they once were. Microsoft's attempts at the tablet and phone markets were largely unsuccessful. A lot of apps that used to be desktop-based are now web-based. For desktop apps, cross-platform development solutions (e.g. Electron) are a lot more popular than they used to be. The alternatives to Windows on desktop/laptop (macOS, Linux, ChromeOS) are arguably more compelling and more practical than they used to be. Linux, not Windows, dominates in the server space. In cloud, Microsoft is stuck in second place position. The generation coming up through the school system right now is more familiar with Google Docs than Microsoft Office. Microsoft's language platform (.NET, C#, etc) has decent marketshare but competitors such as Java and Python are ahead.
So even if some people at Microsoft want to repeat Microsoft's EEE strategy from the 1990s, Microsoft doesn't really have the same foundation that it had in the 90s to make such a strategy successful. And that 90s strategy, even if it worked in the short to medium term, doesn't appear to have been a long-term success – Internet Explorer may have killed Netscape, but arguably Chrome has killed Edge. Microsoft's attempts to EEE Java likewise failed – Visual J++ and J# are history, and Java is still more popular than .Net/C#.