I think you are talking past me, though. My claim is that it took massive corporate bucks for Java to get inroads. Specifically because it was competing with some free options.
Common lisp had nothing like that. Nor did Ada. Or... really, any other language? Microsoft did a pretty heavy push with C# and the general .NET ecosystem. Though, even they had to resort to destroying a lot if the VBScript world that had proliferated quite heavily by just being available on tools that folks otherwise had.
Java was free, too; and at the time, djgpp was effectively the only free c++ toolchain on DOS and Windows.
Common Lisp wasn't even available to DOS and Windows users, let alone free or corporately backed. Even now every single free common lisp has substandard or outright broken Windows support.
Common Lisp didn't bother to show up to the party. That's the first problem; it was priced terribly, when it did become usefully available.
It was GCC being free, and on DOS thanks to djgpp, that made it successful; and it didn't need corporate megabucks to do it.