I wonder if creating a different OS account on the same day-to-day work laptop with limited access to app, games and no internet would trigger the same "Pavlovian response" the article talks about. Did anyone tried this approach?
To answer my own question, articles and downloads all point to the IBM website, and the first lesson teaches you to "Get started with Hadoop-based data analytics on IBM Cloud" so it's clearly IBM pushing for their BigData solution based on Hadoop.