"Given the eminent background of both academics, though, this is surprising. DeWitt has researched large parallel DBMS since the 1980s and, in addition to his pioneering work on Ingres and Postgres, Stonebraker is currently active in the large DBMS area with his new company Vertica."

Someone with a strong background in DBMSes doesn't get a new technology somewhat unrelated to them because of "expertise bias". What's surprising?

I think the quality of Mr. Manchester's article is pretty low. Apart from the title, it reads like it was written by the Columbia NLP Newsblaster running in Fox news "fair and balanced" mode. Other than a few errors, the text is just a collection of fragments of what others have said.