I remember a Stanford lecture video that said "well, if we called it Map, Sort, Group-reduce then no-one would use it :P" but that's a minor naming issue to des

I remember a Stanford lecture video that said "well, if we called it Map, Sort, Group-reduce then no-one would use it :P" but that's a minor naming issue to describe just the subtly you are exactly describing, which is to just not be entirely random in the specifics of how the MapReduce is executed.