Running map/reduce on an array or on a petabyte data set does not change the fundamental method at all. It very much changes the fundamental method. It takes s

Running map/reduce on an array or on a petabyte data set does not change the fundamental method at all. It very much changes the fundamental method. It takes something that was once impossible given all existing techniques and technologies, and makes it possible. The new techniques and technologies are at the core of the patent. any competent programmer could extend the original concept of map/reduce to that level. Patently false. At the very least, you need a decent sized team of very competent programmers, DBAs, and system administrators to architect and build the system, and another programming test team to ensure that it is reliable. And then you'd only have a working prototype. This isn't nearly as trivial as you make it out to be. Hadoop is evidence of that, it's going on 4 years and four thousand changesets, with changes by over 50 people from Apache, Yahoo! and the general public. Its source directory (for only the common project, not including the HDFS) clocks in at 328 KLOC. MapReduce wasn't some little side project hack-job. But then again, you could probably code up Stack Overflow in a weekend, couldn't you?