Who in the world wants to work with little or mildly large data? No one. Everyone does Big Data. I've used the word too when processing < 1TB worth of data. Seemed big to me.
It is really just a fad word at this point "Cloud". *aaS, or how "Object Oriented" was.
Soooo true. In my former life I frequently came across traders or quantitative analysts who wanted to use "big data stuff" to analyze their stupid ideas. I never gave these people clusters of Hapoops or whatever they'd been reading about on the blogs. Usually what I did is reformatted their data files into column-oriented systems (like Vertica) or varint+delta-encoded timeseries that would fit into a single CPU's cache memory.