Bigtable folks wrote a follow-up paper to the original, but it was turned down by the conference's reviewers for not being novel enough or something like that,

Bigtable folks wrote a follow-up paper to the original, but it was turned down by the conference's reviewers for not being novel enough or something like that, so the team just went ”ok, whatever..." and moved on. Years later, there were a couple of talks by Carter and Phaneendhar at the HBase conference that might have been hosted at Google NY.