Sun bails on NetBeans merger with Eclipse

It seems that Sun has chosen to discontinue discussions about coalescing NetBeans with Eclipse.

From the perspective of Java developers, does this really make any difference? The competition seems to be helping make both platforms improve faster than they otherwise might.

However, from the perspective of trying to grow the Java developer market, especially w.r.t. the Microsoft juggernaut, the lack of a dominant development platform is a bit of a detriment.