I could be wrong here, but my sense of Hadoop is that it's going to prove to be a dead end in the long run. Granted, evolutionary dead ends in technology can be

I could be wrong here, but my sense of Hadoop is that it's going to prove to be a dead end in the long run. Granted, evolutionary dead ends in technology can be very lucrative (look at Cobol, or Java). They aren't exciting, but there's money in them. That said, the aesthetic compromises made to appeal to the Java community, scaled out over years or decades, tend to make things bloated and hard to use. I don't see people being excited to do Hadoop, or wanting to learn it on their own time. It's much more interesting to learn the fundamentals of distributed systems than to learn a specific set of Java classes. Personally, I'm finding myself increasingly burned out on "frameworks" that appeal to out-of-touch corporate decision-makers (who are attracted to the idea of a packaged "product" that solves everything) but tend to be overfeatured while under-delivering (especially if time to learn how to use the framework properly is included) when it counts. I'm much more interested in the modularity that you see in, say, the Haskell community where "framework" means something that would be a microframework anywhere else.