He's right that Hadoop needs to be simpler, easier and faster to use than it is right now. And I don't doubt there is value in being someone who puts a friendl

He's right that Hadoop needs to be simpler, easier and faster to use than it is right now. And I don't doubt there is value in being someone who puts a friendlier layer on top of it. However, I don't think doing so would be as huge or game-changing as he argues. Any company that has somehow aggregated petabytes of data probably has some reasonably competent developers and admins. Dealing with the inevitable scale-related issues will either burn someone out or make them competent. For these developers, getting Hadoop running now is probably easier than doing whatever else they've been doing to keep aggregating these petabytes of data. I went from knowing little about Hadoop to running relatively complex queries in a matter of hours through Amazon EMR and Hive (a SQL-ish layer on top of Hadoop). Basically, I gzipped and uploaded the data to an S3 bucket, downloaded a client to easily use the EMR API, wrote a simple Hive query derived from examples, and it just worked. All this was much easier than what I've had to do to keep a MySQL cluster or web application running.