In a recent article post on ciol.com Jeff Jackson, The V.P. of Java and Developer Platforms Group, sidelines joining the 'Eclipse' initiative quoting the need for choice to spur competition.
The Eclipse open-source development platform has far outdistanced Sun Microsystems Inc.'s NetBeans in terms of developer and vendor support, but Sun has vowed to continue to innovate around NetBeans while practically everybody else in the Java world is supporting Eclipse. Timothy Cramer, director of NetBeans in the Java and Developer Tools group at Sun, said of Eclipse: "They do have a lot of momentum … but I think they're going to end up with a lot of competing interests."
I think it's nice that Java users have several strong choices in terms of IDEs . . . Netbeans, Eclipse, IntelliJ.
I myself have used all 3 and find the freedom of choice quite nice compared to Visual Studio.
Yanick Duchesne, A Netbeans Developer is quoted saying "[Netbeans] Very fast (at least,
on Linux, it is way faster than Eclipse, and I would be tempted to say that it should approach Eclipse on Windows ...)...... I did not think I'd be saying this, but it don't seem like I'll be switching back..."
Charles Ditzel the vociferous critic of Eclipse on Mac OS X wrote in his blog : "The realities are something different than the IBM marketing and advertising dollars can buy and the current trends do not bide well for Eclipse. Successive versions of Eclipse have become slower and more resource hungry than its predecessors and each new version of NetBeans since 3.5 has been faster. This has become a serious concern and the Eclipse
organization is working on usability while at the same time facing increasingly fierce criticism not only on the issue of performance but also for the weak performance and reliability of Eclipse on non-Windows platforms."
The result is that many Eclipse developers have switched to NetBeans and others are beginning the migration to NetBeans by using both IDEs.