As I head off on my summer break (where I celebrate my birthday by turning off my laptop and sitting in the dark in my flat watching Paul Verhoeven sci-fi movies), Marissa Meyer's concurrent change of scene is not only more newsworthy, but additionally considerably more productive. At least that's Yahoo's hope for persuading Google's famous but previously somewhat sidelined employee No. 20 to move over to the world of overused exclamation marks.

It's been a hobby or even a fall back position for the tech press to give Yahoo an occasional drubbing when it was a quiet day on the wires. Barely a month goes by without an retrospective along the lines of, "What is Yahoo good for precisely?"

Well, Big Data, for one thing.

During what I will refer back to in the future as the "Big Data Spring of 2012," it was almost impossible to move for mentions of Big Data and its poster child technology: Hadoop. Throw a stick at our list of evaluated vendors in the Enterprise Search space and you'd almost certainly hit one who either announced or reaffirmed their commitment to bundling a build of Hadoop into their grand architectural plans for dealing with Big Data. Not least Yahoo themselves, spinning off their own elephantine "Hortonworks" into a separate company at the turn of the year.

Yahoo of course has played a bigger role in the evolution of Hadoop thus far than any other commercial organization. When Doug Cutting was looking to increase the rate of development for his alternative to Google's own internally developed file system (GFS) and distributed job managing tool (MapReduce), it was Yahoo who stepped in to provide him with a fully-funded and autonomous team to help deliver what we now know as Hadoop. Yet their role in its development and commitment to maintaining it as an Apache project has got somewhere lost in the story (Wired carried a nice long-form article on this, late last year).

So at least somewhere deep under the technological covers there will be something familiar for Meyer upon her arrival. Something created in the image of her former employer, but executed at her new one. Everybody's favorite tech punching bag -- the rather secret Big Data heroes...