Big Data Now: Current Perspectives from O'Reilly Radar

Chapter 4. The Business of Data

There’s no such thing as big data

Even if you have petabyes of data, you still need to know how to ask the right questions to apply it.

by Alistair Croll

“You know,” said a good friend of mine last week, “there’s really no such thing as big data.”

I sighed a bit inside. In the past few years, cloud computing critics have said similar things: that clouds are nothing new, that they’re just mainframes, that they’re just painting old technologies with a cloud brush to help sales. I’m wary of this sort of techno-Luddism. But this person is sharp, and not usually prone to verbal linkbait, so I dug deeper.

He’s a ridiculously heavy traveler, racking up hundreds of thousands of miles in the air each year. He’s the kind of flier airlines dream of: loyal, well-heeled, and prone to last-minute, business-class trips. He’s is exactly the kind of person an airline needs to court aggressively, one who represents a disproportionally large amount of revenues. He’s an outlier of the best kind. He’d been a top-ranked passenger with United Airlines for nearly a decade, using their Mileage Plus program for everything from hotels to car rentals.

And then his company was acquired.

The acquiring firm had a contractual relationship with American Airlines, a competitor of United with a completely separate loyalty program. My friend’s air travel on United and its partner airlines dropped to nearly nothing.

He continued to book hotels in Shanghai, rent cars in Barcelona, and buy meals ...