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.