Perhaps the biggest "fake-out" in 21st century computing: Google publicly released its MapReduce paper -- directing most of the rest of the industry toward loosely coupled, overly complex distributed data processing systems like Hadoop for the following decade -- but internally they just bought a bunch of atomic clocks and built a distributed RDBMS.
I know this is a somewhat simplified story, but it does make me chuckle.
I know this is a somewhat simplified story, but it does make me chuckle.