http://gigaom.com/2013/08/19/why-its-way-too-early-to-dismiss-big-datas-economic-impact/

The New York Times published an article on Friday asking in its headline whether big data is a economic dud. Numerous quoted professors gave reasons why the analogy of data to oil doesn’t work, nor does the one of data to the electrical grid (and here I thought that analogy was about cloud computing). All in all, it was kind of foolish.

I think a more accurate criticism of big data is probably to say it’s suffering from a case of being overhyped — vendors says their technologies do lots of things, but they don’t always spell out how much work that’s going to be. (Being overhyped, by the way, is not the same as being all hype.) As I’ve written before, anyone now getting upset that big data isn’t a perfect set of technologies and methodologies probably wasn’t paying much attention to what experts have been saying for years. But being overhyped now doesn’t mean big data can’t have a significant impact over time.