You appear to be quoting from one of my posts when you talk about competing with Java and ASP.NET. I guess you haven't read my other posts, or you would know that I have done a much more substantial benchmark than you, and Perl won. In a test using Resin (one of the fastest servlet containers around) and mod_perl, fetching data from an Oracle database and displaying it on a page was faster in Perl. There are no doubt specific tests where Java would be faster, but most of my work centers around building web sites and using databases, and Perl definitely seems to be equal or better than Java there.

As for the "big names" you worked for, I doubt they are as big as the companies that do use Perl every day to power their sites: Yahoo, Amazon, Ticketmaster/CitySearch, etc. Incidentally, these are also the companies that look like they might be able to make a profit on the web.