Microsoft had C#, at one point IBM pushed SmallTalk. C++ for these environments is doable but going to slow you down at development a lot, as well as being much harder to secure.
At that time the dynamic alternative was Perl, and that remained true basically until Rails came along.
I am not sure. C# came long after Java already made inroads into the Enterprise space. It was a different time.
I would say that many things in IT are not chosen on technical merits alone. You have people that do not want to accrue any blame. Back then, by choosing what IBM endorses or what Microsoft endorses, you absolve yourself of fallout from if and when things go wrong.
Back in the 90s, it felt like IBM, Redhat, Sun kind of, sort of, got together and wanted to keep Microsoft from taking over the Enterprise space by offering Java solutions.
Right. Before Microsoft created .NET and C# they first tried to play their "embrace, extend, extinguish" trick with Java. They released a JVM and "Visual J++" language which was sort of Java, but had incompatible proprietary extensions to lock customers in to Windows. Eventually they were forced to stop that for legal reasons so they completely dropped all Java support, and built their own replacement virtual machine and associated languages from scratch.
Microsoft had C#, at one point IBM pushed SmallTalk. C++ for these environments is doable but going to slow you down at development a lot, as well as being much harder to secure.
At that time the dynamic alternative was Perl, and that remained true basically until Rails came along.