This week Microsoft Research released Project Daytona MapReduce Runtime, a developer preview of a new product designed for working with large distributed data sets. Microsoft also has a big data analytics platform that uses LINQ instead of MapReduce called LINQ to HPC. Notably, LINQ to HPC is used in production at Microsoft Bing.

But Microsoft is entering an increasingly crowded market. There's the open source Apache Hadoop, which is now being sold in different flavors by companies such as Cloudera, DataStax, EMC, IBM and soon a spin-off of Yahoo. Not to mention HPCC which will be open-sourced by LexisNexis.

Microsoft's products are currently in early, experimental stages and the company may never step up the development and marketing of these to be serious Hadoop and HPCC competitors. But could Microsoft be competitive here if it wants to?