Well, actually the battle of the would be webservice Titans.
Oracle has rebutted Microsoft's claims about the speed of .NET relative to the speed of J2EE. Turns out (of course) the Microsoft verson of the famous Java Petstore demo was performance optimised. The original version was written for clarity in use of J2EE API's for beginners, and tried to exercise the use of various design guidelines that prove important and practical for scalable systems. (n-tier design, abstract database logic). Applying the same optimisations to J2EE Oracle more than tie the game.

Not that I'm surprised the Microsoft stats were bogus, but the story has two good points:

• As previousle evidenced by studies of programmer productivity, efficiency (in development time or execution time) comes from the programmer primarily and from programming paradigm secondly (the 'close-to-the-metal' skill and toolset are important)
• There is such a thing as too much of a good thing (in this case design for scalability over code size and speed)

So much for the would be Titans. One of the real ones have also commented.