Strawman. Of course mapping followed by reducing isn't new, nobody serious ever claimed that it was (the Dean & Ghemawat paper certainly doesn't). Systems ded

Strawman. Of course mapping followed by reducing isn't new, nobody serious ever claimed that it was (the Dean & Ghemawat paper certainly doesn't). Systems dedicated to performing map-reduce operations using giant clusters of commodity hardware over tera/petabytes of data are, though, if for no other reason than that the presence of and resources to economically store that much data have only recently become widely available. MapReduce, as a term, refers to those systems, not just the act of mapping and reducing.