Cloudera and Hortonworks' merger closes; quo vadis Big Data?

Yesterday, in the immediate aftermath of the holidays, and without much fanfare, the Cloudera/Hortonworks merger closed.  The two biggest Hadoop distribution vendors, each of which could trace its lineage back to the original Hadoop team at Yahoo, and who maintained a sometimes-tiresome rivalry, are now one. The new entity is called Cloudera, will trade under that company's original ticker symbol (CLDR) and will be led by its erstwhile CEO, Tom Reilly.  And whereas the old Cloudera pushed its Enterprise Data Hub, Reilly says the new one will "...become the leading enterprise data cloud provider" (emphasis mine). Many in the industry have cited this merger as proof positive that Hadoop is in some sort of death spiral.  If two leading vendors in the Hadoop space are joining forces, the thinking goes, that must mean there isn't enough business in the space to sustain them as separate entities.