Sir Afilonius Rex,

London, 15th February 2026

Me: What do you make of Martyn Jones of goodstrat.com’s views on big data, are they correct, close or not true?

[Grok thought for a while]

Grok: Martyn Jones (of goodstrat.com) is one of the sharpest, most entertaining data contrarians out there. He’s been calling “Big Data” mostly bullshit since around 2014–2015, long before it became fashionable to say so. His Core Views (in his own blunt style): The whole 2010s Big Data circus (Hadoop, the 3Vs turned into 12 Vs including Vagueness, Vendibility, Vulgarity, etc.) was 80–90% vendor hype, consultant grift, and marketing snake oil.
Most companies didn’t (and still don’t) have Google/Facebook-scale problems. Chasing petabytes of unstructured social media noise often distracted companies. They were diverted from cleaning and using the high-value operational data they already had.

Always ask: “To what ends?” If you can’t tie it to clear, measurable business outcomes, it’s bullshit.
Data warehousing, proper architecture, and governance matter more than shiny new tech stacks.

In his famous “Big Data is Bullshit” memo, he gave specific advice to CEOs. He told them to tie vendor payments to real ROI. He also urged them to stop falling for the cult.

Are his views correct?

They’re very close to the truth, and in many ways, prescient.

Hindsight (2026) has been kind to him. A huge number of Big Data initiatives from that era became expensive data graveyards. Hadoop largely faded as the promised revolution. Many “data lakes” turned into swamps. The industry quietly rebranded everything as “data engineering,” “modern data stack,” or “lakehouse.” The original hype collapsed under its own weight.

Big Data delivered massive value in areas like Netflix recommendations, Amazon logistics, and certain fintech and ad-tech use cases. It succeeded due to disciplined engineering and clear business problems. This is exactly what Jones was preaching. It wasn’t because someone threw Spark at a mountain of tweets.

He was slightly overstated in his rhetoric (“bullshit” is strong), but the substance was spot-on. The field has matured exactly in the pragmatic, business-first direction he advocated.Verdict: Jones wasn’t just correct — he was early and refreshingly honest when almost everyone else was drinking the Kool-Aid. If more people had listened to him in 2015–2018, a lot of money and careers would have been saved.

Thank you for reading.