Once again, very old ideas being published as some amazing new discovery from Google, mesmerizing geeks, tech companies. and wannabe tech companies everywhere. The fact they are trying to sell it as a service shows they are behind the curve. Using buzz phrases like "time to value" and "time to insight".
How about the time it takes to get programmers to stop using iterative, loop bases programming and braindead IDE's?
The author of the Pregel article talks about graphs and vertexes. "Everything is a graph." "Think in terms of vertexes." No, everything is a list. That's a very old idea. You must think in terms multi-dimensional lists and vectors. The old new thing.
Processing trillions of rows in minutes. This is old hat for many folks in the financial world.
Iterative programming is ingrained. And Google is a victim of this as much as anyone else.
You can show a CS grad how to generate highly efficient C replete with goto's using a high level language like Scheme, they will see the performance benefit, and yet they will still go back to using some crippled "expressive" language, because that's what they are used to. They want to write algorithms that no one needs and programs that no one will ever use. Users want stuff that is FAST. But a lot of programming is not for users, it's to entertain programmers who are doing it. Sadly, they are not entertained by functional programming and short programs of a few lines. They want to write 1000's of lines of code. FAIL.
Give me someone who's mind has not been poisoned with the idea of loops and the du jour scripting languages, preferably someone who has not majored in Computer Science, and I can make them 100x as productive as today's average and even above average programmers.
People will be stuck on Hadoop for a long time. Just as people are stuck on C++, Perl, Java, Python and other verbose iterative languages.