I've seen hbase used in production at a number of startups, and worked at one where it was used. It's very powerful and flexible, but it's also not like running any other database. Setting up Cassandra is like "java cassandra.jar". Setting up HBase is...someone's job for a while is going to be "running HBase".
Anyway, I'm talking about small-ish startups that aren't super researchy technological trailblazers. There are definitely people outside of microsoft (I'm assuming that's what you meant instead of Google as Google already had BigTable and HBase started out as a Powerset project and so ended up at Microsoft) running HBase in production.
Anyway, I'm talking about small-ish startups that aren't super researchy technological trailblazers. There are definitely people outside of microsoft (I'm assuming that's what you meant instead of Google as Google already had BigTable and HBase started out as a Powerset project and so ended up at Microsoft) running HBase in production.