The paper was co-authored by David DeWitt, not Microsoft. DeWitt is a well-known database researcher from Wisconsin. And Microsoft, despite their awful history of business practices, pours tons of funding into really good quality research (via MSR).
I'm not saying people aren't biased by their associations -- certainly, the traditional DBMS community feels like they have to defend their research & products against new techniques like MapReduce.. but if you're going to criticize the paper, criticize it because you found flaws in its contents, not because of the organization listed beneath an author.
I'm not saying people aren't biased by their associations -- certainly, the traditional DBMS community feels like they have to defend their research & products against new techniques like MapReduce.. but if you're going to criticize the paper, criticize it because you found flaws in its contents, not because of the organization listed beneath an author.