Ask a room of developers "who is creating something innovative that doesn't already exist" and many will raise their hands. But they're fooling themselves. IT innovation was commonplace 20 years ago. Not so much now, unless small iterative improvements or missing features finally being added are a new definition of innovation

OK, on that one, I don't see it the same way. Obviously, I'm going to focus on the space I work in, but there have been quite a number of features beyond small and iterative that MS and Oracle have implemented, in attempts to "one-up the other side" in terms of data warehousing.

As one example, Microsoft created the first pure columnstore index (all other implementations were hybrids) and made it updateable - this has been a game-changer. DW queries can run over 10x faster. That's huge.

They've also implemented a 2nd generation data warehouse appliance scaling out to petabytes. (And finally, case studies are coming in)

And even though I'm not an Oracle fan, they've done things with in-memory OLTP engines that have also increased performance exponentially.

I understand the point about hobbyist developers and their perceptions - but the strides made in data warehousing technology the last 5 years have been huge. And yes, I'm eating my words on Apache Hadoop - I underestimated open source.