Hadoop marketing themes that deserve to be ignored
This is part of a four-post series, covering:
- Annoying Hadoop marketing themes that should be ignored (this post).
- Hadoop versions and distributions, and their readiness or lack thereof for production.
- In general, how “enterprise-ready” is Hadoop?
- HBase 0.92.
The posts depend on each other in various ways.
I am subjected to much Hadoop marketing. Indeed, I even help various clients inflict Hadoop marketing upon the world. But a guy’s got to draw a line somewhere, and there are certain Hadoop marketing themes that I just refuse to take seriously.
1. Big data. I think the term “big data” long ago jumped the shark. If a firm uses the term “big data”, I teeth-grittingly let it pass. But if they send me PR email offering to “explain” the benefits or “real meaning” of “big data”, my response is apt to be unkind.
2. Conference-timed news. I’ve never liked the custom of multiple vendors piling announcements into the same conference week. It seems like a calculated strategy to ensure getting the least possible mind share and attention — unless, of course, your announcement is so lame that brief mentions in conference-week roundups are the most visibility you can hope to get. Even so, many vendors make the marketing choice to pile on. Fine. But I’ll write in response if and when I feel like it.
3. Contribution Olympics. The Urinary Olympics as to who contributed more lines of code, patches, whatever to various Hadoop sub-projects got pretty silly; and although it peaked last year, elements of it are with us still. I do see two scenarios where the whole discussion might have genuine value, namely:
- When two vendors — typically Hortonworks and Cloudera — differ about a particular Hadoop sub-project, I’m inclined to believe the one who asserts “Well, we built most of and then extensively tested the last release of this, and it does what we say it does.”
- If you have a specialized desire to see a particular aspect of Hadoop hacked, there are a limited number of developers who are best-suited to do it for you, and you might be best served to deal with the company that employs (most of) them.
Otherwise, however, I pay little attention to claims like “We thought this scheme up 2 years ago, and hence we’re the experts on whether it’s now ready for production.”
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12 Responses to “Hadoop marketing themes that deserve to be ignored”
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Curt, FYI, the hyperlinks in the preamble of each of these four posts are broken. ~ s/06/07
I think you’re getting ahead of yourself =]
What else would you call big data? Kind of new to all of hadoop and all unstructured data.
Is hadoop the only way to get answers out of unstructered data?
Raoul
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“The Urinary Olympics”…
Not quite as elegant as “machine-generated data” and some of the other concepts you have coined but descriptive and entertaining nonetheless.
Hi Ken,
I picked it up from a football coach argument 40 years ago, between John McKay of USC and John Ralston of Stanford. Memory tells me it was Ralston who said it, but that could be wrong, as McKay was a guy who had other great one-liners.
RE: “as to who contributed more lines of code”. Not impressed either.
Real skill is who can remove the most lines of code AND maintain or increase functionality while doing so. No one seems to brag about this though…
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All good points.
Like all vogue phrases/concepts in IT, once the ‘big data’ genie has escaped the bottle there’s no putting it back in.
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