Slashdot Mirror
Is Tableau The Next Google?
Roland Piquepaille writes "At least, the founders of Tableau Software, a small company established in 2003 and based in Seattle, come from Stanford University, where they worked down the hall with Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin back in 1997. In 'Tableau making name for itself,' the Seattle Post-Intelligencer writes that Tableau intends to make structured databases easy to use the way Google did with unstructured data. So the company is turning databases into easy-to-generate graphics. Tableau doesn't say who are its customers, but claims that it has more than 100 installations and that it's already profitable. This graphical data mining tool runs on desktops and costs $1,000 per user for a standard edition and $1,600 per user for a professional version. Will this company be successful and become another Google? Read more and decide after looking at an example of database drilling."
Never. I love my google.
Only until Microsoft includes this feature into Excel. Seriously, it seems like a glorified Graphing feature.
Certainly not something that can be used by hundreds of millions of internet users.
This news posting is so technically incoherent as to be really quite pointless beyond corporate advertising.
Unstructured data? What are you talking about? Data is by definition structured! This tool just looks like yet another OLAP tool, which have been around for awhile now.
How does this compare to google in any way other than that they are both companies that use computers? Total incoherence.
They won't be another Google because Google made something that everyone on the internet uses, while Tableau makes something useful for only a small group of businesses. Plus it's not free as in beer.
Unless I'm missing something...
This sounds like a great tool. I know we have a lot of problems with getting our data into a report form for corporate. We are thinking about bringing someone on to write such reports full time because their nature and specs are constantly changing. If this tool can allow someone with limited technical ability to mine our data for marketing information we could save a lot of money with it.
... shameless plug to get myself a free ipod follows (yes it's legit)
warning
"I can not bring myself to believe that if knowledge presents danger, the solution is ignorance" - Isaac Asimov
Claims to have hundreds of customers... The best product. I've heard it thousands of times before... keep the hype machine going, and the stock price rising...
this looks more like cnet every day, lol
This graphical data mining tool runs on desktops and costs $1,000 per user for a standard edition and $1,600 per user for a professional version. Will this company be successful and become another Google?
Let's see:
One has a kick ass interface and is free.
One runs on windows and cost over 1K per user
One is geek friendly and intelligent.
One is utterly, utterly unknown.
One has "Do No Evil" all over their offices
One astroturfs Slashdot for a news story
Dunno guys. I think it's a wash.
Google provides the service for free, and makes profits from other venues around the service, and Tableau provices a service with a fee.
so in terms of popularity and usage, it probably won't be another Google, but profitability wise, who knows? If you have a unique product/service that people are willing to pay for, then it's profitable.
Uselessful technology (Air-Charged
Damn, this really doesn't seem to have that much to do with Google. Can we stop using them as a buzzword? I'm sure we're all sick of this.
Maybe it's just my age, but every great product I've seen has not been hyped like this. It just discredits Google in my opinion, even though it's not really their fault.
I use google many times a day. I can't see this graphing tool becoming as ubiqituous as Google. I can't see that company name entering the English language as a verb like google.
Can you pay to get your story on Slashdot these days? This seems more like advertising. It certainly isn't interesting news.
Hrm, I can think of a handful of similar apps, it's hardly even nerd news.
How much for a front page posting? Seems like many stories these days are just ads.
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
If you were to have predicted in 1997 that ANY ONE company would be worth billions, you'd be smart, but to have predicted that COMPANY X would be worth billions, you'd be genius...
Please careful with the Slashdotting http://www.oracleguy.ws/
I've never heard of them and htey've got their own domain already? No http://stanford.edu/users/jerry/? No http://google.stanford.edu? If these guys want it big-time, they should earn their keep on stanford.edu - go for http://morpheus.cs.stanford.edu/~tableausoftwareid ea, ???, profit.
As a general rule of thumb, and as my parents taught me, no matter what is billed as "the next" anything (or anyone, for that matter), it is doomed to failure. The logic behind this is, I've determined, that by saying something is the next "X", one has set up that comparison in the minds of others; when that something does not turn out to be like, as good as, or a duplicate of "X", people assume it is a failure and avoid it as such. In their minds, they were given a sort of promise, no matter who or whom said it, that "Y" was going to be "X", again.
Will Tableau be the next Google? No, but it will be Tableau, and may even be a great service. Whether or not it will succeed, and why, remains to be determined.
(In my opinion, the difficulty of spelling a name with three vowels next to each other will be strike one against Tableau... if people can't remember how to spell it, they won't be able to find it the first/second/third/etc. time.)
~UP
Eat the Path.
Seems like every tenth article is there to provide a link to Piquepille (or however you spell that asshat's name) and his blog. Why can't he just write a long story submission, and the editors display the first paragraph of it?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I've developed an SQL tool (a little improvement here, a little there, as needed) which is getting pretty nice and takes care of 90% of what I do, but there's still enough stuff that's sufficiently weird that some element of coding is required to keep the needed and discard the unneeded and generate the end result. Then there's the bombastic treatment of data as the database designers subject us to which means even more finagling.
Anyone got a demo they've downloaded and tried?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Here's an idea:
1) Find a small company on the stock exchange
2) Buy some shares in it for a low price
3) Post a story on Slashdot with the company name and 'Google' in the same sentence
4) Watch the stock price go through the roof
5) Profit
The day that I have to stop telling people that ask for help "Google is your friend". You can create the greatest search tool in the world, but if the end-user is too oblivious to use it...
There is a difference between "insightful" and "inciteful" other than spelling.
Can anyone spell Crystal Reports? How about FileMaker, which /. has already covered today? This is a shameless attempt at marketing, even if the whole "we started down the hall from ."
Pure Spam. Slashdot is SO not immune to spam on the front page.
Just so you people know, Roland Piquepaille (the submitter of this story) has a growing repuation as a "blog spammer". That is, he sends in stories to slashdot compulsively (and I assume sometimes repetitively to get it on the front page) which always include a link to his blog at the end which provides him revenue from the ads on his site.
I'm not going to go as far as a lot of people who post about this and claim that this makes him an inherently evil force that must be stopped, it doesn't, but I'd just like people to be aware of this. I mean, his blog entry on the topic is usually just a rehashing of the articles submitted adding nothing. I really think the editors should edit out the compulsive blog link, but whatever, there's a lot of things we all think the editors should do that they don't.
When asked if he was the next Greg LeMond, a young Lance Armstrong replied, "No, I'm the first Lance Armstrong."
Tableau should follow the example and make their own name for themselves.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Slashdot "editors", you accept this "story"?! This is one of the most inane stories to reach the front page. This is bullshit.
Sounds like yet-another-data-visualization-startup - what we really need is a product which turns a database query into an RSS feed, so it's easy to keep track of new matches. If it can be done for Google, and these people are meant to be the next Google, why are they doing it for databases? Pointless story if you ask me.
Honestly, I don't even see how somebody could think that it ever could be. Sounds like marketing got carried away (and it worked, I guess, we're discussing them, aren't we?).
We at interactive reporting, offer a much easier to use graphical analysis tool. You can play around with it online, and even download a free trial.
We have developed a template based approach to reporting and BI, that allows you to reuse complex reporting structures, and then map it into any underlying database.
www.interactivereporting.com
sorry about the blatant plug!
I know I'll get a few posts saying, "I understood it just fine,"
No, you'll get a few posts calling you a fuckwit because the irony of your rant is underscored by your inability to spell 'grammar'.
My name is Troll Montoya
you kill my posts,
I hope you die.
Google isn't even the next Google yet, really.
With the rising number of silly astroturfish advertising getting by the editors, slash needs an ability to let users filter submissions based on the submitter. hrm, it could be a simple extension to the 'foe' feature for comments.
At these prices I'm almost propelled back 10 years in time to Unix workstation per seat licensing practices. Nothing that costs a grand a seat will ever achive the penetration Google has. Geeze these guys have 100 customers, you'd think someone there would be smart enough to wake up one day and realize why they have 100 custs. Why bother even writing a puff piece about some expensive data mining app? You've gotta be out of your tree to see something like this and think Google. There's any number of useful but expensive software packages sold by relatively anonymous niche players that would make a much better analogy (although few charge as much as these guys). I guess since Google just floated for a wad of cash they're the round hole into which this square peg of a company would like to be bashed by their cooperative 'journalist'.
Not yet anyway. Regardless of the shady posting motives of the story poster and the somewhat shady newsvalue, I'll still post my opinion of the tableau software.
I'm a Data Manager for a medical reasearch non-profit and one of the most time consuming and difficult things to do is get good, reliable, interesting data out of the mountain of collected data in the database. I've had to fire off some very nasty sql queries and sit with doctors redoing statistics over and over until they are right...there's just so much room for error and so much complexity. I've also written tools to give some instant analysis to the doctors, similar to what the tableau software does. (of course, my stuff is super-simple and rudimentary, tableau has lots more functionality, but thats to be expected). The bottom line is, big deal. While that sort of data analysis is good and mildly useful, its not worth $1600 to my company when I can do it on demand in a few minutes. Plus I know what I'm doing, who knows what the tableau software is spitting out -- I'm my own QC guy. Until Natural Language Queries on databases start working right and become well featured, well implemented and widespread, its going to take human intelligence and personal knowledge of the database structure to get good data out. The tableau software is pretty, but its just not enough -- its not going to replace what I can do, and its not going to worth it enough for companies who have data managers to buy. In which case, its overpriced. It's not the next google -- its just pretty graphics. Its a nice program at $100, not $1000.
Moo.
a worthless POS
So much fun. And so, so utterly useless 95% of the time.
I've been working on particle systems for large scale data visualization. Even got some working code up -- see this for the results of my DNS server research (every particle is a host). It's...OK. The problem is that while a good chunk of our brain is devoted to visual processing, a good chunk of what we do is decidedly abstract and non-visual. Playing across these mental lines can usefully employ underutilized computation frameworks, but that doesn't mean that it will.
Think -- crypto on a GPU, not particularly fast (floating point and crypto only work well together in one extraordinarily obscure context).
It's alot of fun to play in this domain, and occasionally the results are really really useful (like this rendering of failed entropy generators). But...yeah. Way too often, your output isn't as useful as a quickly resortable log file.
That's what makes it such a great challenge, of course. Few other fields show themselves to be empty of value so late in the dev cycle. (Biotech people have it worse, of course.)
--Dan
I know it's hard to believe, but business people don't want to dump their database out into tab delimited format and graph their stuff in excel ( or crystal reports or [ insert name here ] )
... fluffers.
There are many companies that are built on just this premise and long before this company was even scribble on some wankers napkin. ( executive-dashboards.com, crystal reports, databeacon etc. )
This is pure marketing fluff. and what does that make us for even discussing this crap... that's right
Speaking of front-page topics ... Is there anyway to configure Slashdot so that EVERY story is on my frontpage? I just don't get the whole slashbox concept and the docs are sorta cryptic. Thanks for the off-topic help.
This guy, Roland Piquepaille, plugs products in his blogs and submits links to Slashdot, which, incredibly, are accepted. Check out his other posts, he has had a submission accepted every day for the last 4 days, all the submissions are the same style and format, and all have a link to some new product. STOP FEEDING HIM PAGE VIEWS!
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Maybe they should change their name to something decent. That would never ever stick like the "Google."
This parent is SO correct that it needs to be raised to be the FIRST post that people read.
So moderators... supress the mod points for all comments before this one.
Experiment!
No. Next Question please!
Seriously it represents a great product, provided it isn't swallowed by M$FT and integrated into MS Office. I would rue that day.
Visual representation of data allows human mind to discern patterns in data more easily and this tool is built with exactly that in mind. Couple that with universal data access and export formats, and they have a killer product.
Way to Go !!!
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
Free, open source Aspseek looks more like future Google competitor to me.
Okay, so he was caught drunk driving once, but come on. Frasier was a good show.
Not a flaimbait. Not lame. Just a question.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
These guys are astroturfing. Part of their marketing campaign is to create an association with Google, so when you think Google, you think of whatever the heck their name is. Remember: There's no such thing as bad publicity, so even if they don't live up to expectations, they still raised awareness (and fattened their wallets).
Unfortunately, it looks like they succeeded in their first round of 'turfing because they even got me to talk about them; however, they won't get me to say their name (I won't let them enter my consciousness just yet, even if they've planted seeds for my subconscious).
This is crap. They only interface with MS DBs.
FTFA:
Specifications: The Standard Edition of Tableau connects as a client to three types of databases: Microsoft Access, Microsoft Excel and text files. Tableau is not a "data silo." Rather, it issues queries to these existing data sources using standard drivers.
Requirements: Windows 2000 or later release. 30MB hard disk memory
No
No its not the next Google. Its not even a new concept. When I wrote DBD/DBIx::Chart, people questioned my sanity...now I'm questioning my sanity for not charging $1K per seat.
007: "Who are you?"
Pussy: "My name is Pussy Galore."
007: "I must be dreaming..."
No, it isn't.
Hands up who has heard,seen or used BI tools. Obviously the stupid editor posting IT stories doesn't know about common IT tools.
/. is paid to promote a company?
I doubt very much this will turn into something huge. It's just not different enough from the competition.
BI coupled with neural nets is probably the next big thing in mining and presenting data.
I wonder how much
<stupid poster>
OK, I give up! Where is the search box? You know, like the place I type the words I want it to look for?
Oh I get it! I'm supposed to search for the "search" box!
Um, if that's the case I don't think it will catch on! I mean that Google thing has their search box right in the middle of their main page. Duh! This thing sucks. I think I'll stick with DogPile.</stupid poster>
Dude, this looks seriously as shitty as, and even more complicated than Business Objects. Sorry but I don't think this will be the app that finally gets the vast unhackerly masses to understand structured data intuitively.
If he posted more to his blog, I'd add it to the daily read. As it is, I can visit /. and save myself the effort.
Bleh!
took into account the links _to_ a page as a measure of it's relevence.
The idea being that the more linked to a page is, the more value it has - thereby using people as a way of meauring the worth of a page. By examing the words people link with, as well as allowing Googlebombing, it sidesteps meta-tag pollution etc.
Been de-emphasised, compared to other sub-algorithms, but it's not just the appearence that set google apart in the early days. Before they had ad's.
"Early days" *shiver* I can remeber when AltaVista was the pinnicle of web searching, and using Archie and Veronica.
pagerank
Its simple yes, but not as trivial as you seem to suggest.
-ashot
If you have a problem, complain to Hemos or CmdrTaco. Otherwise, get over it. Roland has one of the few decent tech blogs AFAIAC.
Wow if I ever needed confirmation that /. was a bunch of kids and academics this story was it.
/.ers have never worked in the corporate world. They have no idea how little money $1600 is.
$1,600 is peanuts for business software. PEANUTS There would be plenty of companies willing
to shell that out just to TRY something like this.
Is it revolutionary? No
Is it complex? No
Is it useful? Yes
Would it take more
than $1600 to develop
it in house? Yes
Think about that for just a minute, Excel doesn't do all of this and this looks fairly easy to use.
MANY companies are willing to fork over around $400 for Office (bulk) for every one who has a computer
Maybe only 2 or 3 people in a large company would use this and it would be useful
Perhaps this will put it in perspective, when trying to do price point setting in a large volume company selling 3200 products and shipping over 5000 units (in various amounts of those 3200 products) it can be EXTREMELY taxing to figure out what's going on when you have to plot sales vs seasonal vs price changes vs competitor data. A $1600 program that can help your $500/hour accountant save time is a pretty good deal even if they use it only to set the prices of 5% of the items that iss 160 items and if you can make an extra $5 on something you ship 900 of a day the software was barely a fringing blip in cost when it might have saved your accountant 80 hours or more of work you've made out well.
For the most part I get the feeling that
An app that draws charts, BFD.
The only amazing thing about that is the goddam price, 1.6K bucks a throw?
What the alleged similarity between a charting app and Googles might be is beyond my understanding.
Is this the best that the Slashdot editors can come up with? PAH!
Hi, Roland!
The fact remains that if he wants to be a slashdot editor, he ought to just write stories for slashdot, and if he wants to drum up traffic to his blog, he ought to buy a banner on this site instead of constantly somehow convincing editors to take his articles. I hope the /. editorship is getting something out of this because otherwise I'm at a loss as to why his self-promoting blog notifications are being accepted as stories on slashdot.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Anyone comfortable with scripting languages should be able to use the Gnu R statistics package and the GGobi visualization package to get the same effect in a cross-platform, free-as-in-speech way.
I saw Page on plane once, in 1997. I use the internet daily. I have a cache of every porn site on my hard drive. I am a carbon based life form.
The connections and similarities are endless. Watch out Google!
Arbitrary sig
Does roland know Junis, I wonder?
Seriously, this is the crappiest article I've seen on slashdot in months.
A lot of people seem to be slamming the whole idea of visualization of data, or the fact that the software costs $1,600. For a large business where data analysis is done by sales and marketing folks who think a log file is something for rounding off the edges of dead trees, this sort of tool is invaluable.
Now, yes, you can do pivot tables and graphing in Excel, but a tool that can go straight to the database and is extraordinarily easy to use (read: made for dolts) is better.
Does Tableau live up to that? I don't know. But if it does, it is well worth the $1.6k if it means that the IT folk can stop wasting their time doing random reporting stuff. Plus, it's a tax write-off.
Just in case anyone is interested in real, proven data mining software... Check out both SAS and PolyVista. PolyVista is capable of performing some remarkable visualizations that allow you to explore large data sets in ways that just are not possible with traditional OLAP tools.
No Sig For You
Look, I will do anything, anything ... yes, even subscribe to Slashdot to avoid having to see Roland Piquepaille submit his own damn, repetitive, annoying, better-than-thou, and already-covered-by-other-media-outlets-multiple-ti mes stories appear on Slashdot. Really, you're making me want to stop visiting altogether!
Karma? I won't submit, comment, or even visit for karma! That's not a reward system unless you can turn in your karma for cash. Forget it!
Please! Please censor Roland Piquepaille.
(His last name is French, isn't that clue enough?)
I checked the site out and to me this is simply a spreadsheet that automatically graphs the data. I'm sure you could write an excel macro that would do the same thing.
Mod this article as Slashdot spamming. First the ebay article yesterday trying to sell something four times its value and now this??? C'mon guys...
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
God damn it, editors.
I told you to STOP LINKING TO ROLAND "FUCKYFACEY"s WEBLOG.
Tableau is so _NOT_ the next Google it makes me need to take an Advil.
It's a bunch of Active X controls on top of ODBC!!! Here, let me get you a medal.
This kind of OLAP crap is all over the place. At least companies like MindJet or those siggraph guys are trying to think of new ways of representing data.
Let's face it, about 50 Stanford computer science students were "down the hall" from the "Google Guys". And you know what? Most of them are in academia or out of a job right now. So what does that say for these Bozos?
Also, Roland, if you're reading this, I hope you die.
I don't care how, just do it.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Though I was thinking specifically about when someone wanted to type the address into the URL bar, you make an excellent point.
~UP
Eat the Path.
He's not really even trying. These last few articles have been so asinine that it makes me want to find him and put a "kick me" sign on his back.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
I haven't come across a single tech blog worthy of any real consideration. Every one of them is like "Ooooh Shiny, Press Release".
Roland is one of the worst. It just plain sucks. Like "I think the kid is brain damaged but he doesn't realize it" sucks.
PS - Roland, manges la merde.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Does Piquepaille have a contract with Slashdot or something? This is getting annoying.
01010010000110100100111010101010010110010101101010 1001001110100100001010101...
Where's the structure in that, huh? But drag it into *Tableau*, and I'll betcha it gives you a pretty picture!
It sure does, and I wish you'd told us it was NSFW before posting it....
What are these people trying to sell? The connectivity between a visualization tool and a database, or a visualization tool? It seems like they are breaking new ground in neither area: there are well-established spreadsheet, visualization, graphing, and statistical analysis tools, with more ways of interacting with and visualizing your data than you could ever want. And all of those existing tools can use database data, either because they have database functions built-in, or because you can export/import data.
Maybe these people are doing a better job on the user interface or the software engineering, but in terms of technology, I see nothing new there.
This is the Stanford spinoff of the Polaris project presented at IEEE InfoVis several times over the past few years. Chris Stolte was the main student involved, and a CiteSeer search on his name will turn up most of the related work. To summarize: The goal of the work was to provide a visual programming environment (using a spreadsheet-like layout) to presenting data in multi-dimensional databases. It uses some sound (a.k.a., proven) results to create initial intiutive mappings of this data. See the papers for more details.
This just sounds like timothy has friends at Tableau, and he owes them a favour. So he's decided to give them some free advertising. Or he's a little more intelligent and they've payed him a wad of cash to do it.
The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.
The screenshots are really early betas for Excel 2005, right?
I've been using Excel for the last decade or so as my numeric scratchpad when I am manipulating small sets. (Those are sets with less than 2^16 records, Excel's stupidly arbitrary 2-byte length limit per worksheet.)
For years, I have been grumbling that the data manipulation features in Excel are just not strong enough.
I've considered writing a graphical tool that shakes Excel through its VBA interface, but have never really got around to it. I guess I could always buy this.
Of course, this supposedly revolutionary software will probably be priced out of the market for dabblers like me. Too bad.
Good job slashdot community! We just DDOS'd Tableau. They are no longer serving pics.
I know Google prides itself on not dirtily manipulating its search results, but I think they should make an exception in this case. I would like to see a search for this astroturfing corporate website (that is, www.tableausoftware.com) return these results:
Well maybe the next google can afford to pay for some bandwidth.
As others noted, Google started out with more relevant results than other search engines. That is what inspired a mass migration.
Now possibly others might have figured that out eventually. But what you really have to give Google credit for is maintaining performance and relevance. Everyone on earth switching to using your search engine? Seemingly never a problem for Google where I am not sure I've ever seen a perceptible slowdown in search results (think it may have happened once or twice). Also, generally, despite Google being under heavy attack from every shady operation on the planet (literally) seeking to improve search rankings, for most things Google gets me what I need just about right away.
Interestingly this success and following assault, has built the kind of huge "moat" that Warren Buffet talks about looking for in companies that are going to be around to stay. Sure anyone can try to put a search engine together, perhaps even build it to scale as well as Google. But no-one else has the battle-tested experience with the tricks it takes to keep search results relevant. It would be very, very hard to out-Google Google at this point - unless you hire enough key Google staff away. But why would anyone be insane enough to leave Google for a competitor?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Well seeing how they've already surpassed their bandwidth allocation for this month I don't see them being the next google anytime soon. ;)
--
www.tableausoftware.com Temporarily Unavailable
This account has surpassed its bandwidth allocation at the present time. You may reach the account administrator at www@www.tableausoftware.com
Slashdot Threat to Homeland Security?
Web Surfing Hordes Crash Cache
The FCC announced today that the key government websites are vunerable to coordinated attacks by "millions of nerds seeking news that matters". An official spokesman speaking on the condition of anonymity said...
DataViewer
I would not recommend, however, working for them, until there is some staff change.
"...come from Stanford University, where they worked down the hall with Google founders..."
Bah. What difference does that make? Lots of companies got their start at Stanford. SUN did - hell, their name stands for Stanford University Networks. Google doesn't even use SUN hardware (last time I checked...)
Ridge (the winery) was founded by a group of Stanford professors. So is Tableau the next Robert Mondavi? I don't think so.
Everyone will start to cheer when you put on your sailin' shoes.
google is, at least primarily (with the exception of google ads, &c) free to use, ensuring it a wider user database. 1,000 dollar software *can* make a splash...but it's harder.
--A witty sig proves nothing.--
Starlight by PNL labs(they made the CD) is a good visualization tool. Managed by Batelle Corporation it is resonably cheap too. I can do visual analysis in more imensions then you know existed.
Give me a break. Their website is "Temporarily Unavailable" just because they were posted on /. and got a little bit more traffic than usual. Imagine this happening to Google!
"Will this company be successful and become another Google? Read more and decide after looking at an example of database drilling."
The point here is how they look at databases, and the ways they can make the information usuable to all. Similar to how the google search engine searches a massive database to give you a list of relavent websites and ranking them on popularity.
It's the ideas presented, not a $1000 software package that no everyday user needs.
DarkMantle I been bored, so I started a blog.
Unfortunately, it looks like they succeeded in their first round of 'turfing because they even got me to talk about them; however, they won't get me to say their name (I won't let them enter my consciousness just yet, even if they've planted seeds for my subconscious).
Well I won't say their name because I don't even remember it, not only did I not RTFA nor RTFS(ummary), but I didn't even RTFT(itle)!! Haha let's see you're astroturfing compete with my miniscule attention span, why I bet...
bored now, next story
I stole this Sig
if they can't even handle to be slashdotted:
"www.tableausoftware.com Temporarily Unavailable
This account has surpassed its bandwidth allocation at the present time. You may reach the account administrator at.."
Go to homepage preferences, click "Collapse Sections", then click Save at the bottom.
on being the next Google.
I don't remember Google charging $1000 per user license... If by "another Google" they mean, a few folks got stinkin' rich, then yeah, may be; but I don't see them changing the way we browse, and that's what Google did for the internet community.
A terrible defacement to whatever public image existed for poor old Tabby... if you cost that much at least you could have bought your own server and not be stuck on a bandwidth limited XO web hosting solution!
So I guess erm.. not really :)
This article is nothing more than an attempt to get a free ad for corporate software that only runs on MS. Visualization of multidimensional data is nothing new at all - especially not for that money. There are hundreds of software products out there with similar non-existing innovation level - will we get similar crap ads for those too?
This post caught my eye both because, I use Tableau everyday and because without Google, I never would of found it. I am a principle developement engineer at a large manufacturing company. I am often asked to solve problems that require determining the relationship and relative importance of dozens of design choices and or to tune a dozen or more parameters to optimize the performance of the system. While I am a good programmer, I am not a database expert. Prior to using Tableau I was using Excel pivottables or custom programs to explore the relationships amoung variables. This is a tedeous and time consuming process. I have also used Matlab, IGOR, and Origin where appropriate. For a recent project the amount of data overwelmed my usual approaches. Not having time to reinvent the wheel I went looking on Google to find someone that had already solved the problem of exploring unknown relationships in large masses of multidimensional data. I quickly found powerpoint presentations describing Stanford's "Polaris" data visualization tool. The website stated that a comercial version of the tool was in development. I then emailed the project lead, Pat Hanrahan, http://graphics.stanford.edu/~hanrahan/ As he was on vacation, it took over a month to get a response. He pointed me to his start-up Tableau-software. They were just in the process of releasing a beta version. I fell in love with it immediately. I could for the first time, get an intuitive understanding as to how all the variables in the system were interacting. And in just minutes after collecting the raw data. Tableau can look at datasets in the millions of records. Excel is still limited to 2^16-1 records. Why? Could Microsoft adopt many of the features of Tableau? Sure. Will they? Not likely. Excel, after nearly 20 years of development, still does not have a decent default plot format that is acceptable to a scientist or is near publication quality. Instead they look like poorly drawn cartoons. So you are forced to use much more expensive programs like Matlab, Origin, or Mathematica to get decent Plots. Pivot charts are just that, charts. Not a real scatter plot of the data. I have seen engineers completely misinterpret data because they apply a trendline to a pivot chart not relizing that what looks like the x-axis is just a set of labels and the x-axis Microsoft accually uses in the trendline calculation are just ordinal numbers. True engineering data visualization is simply not the market Microsoft is after. The examples displayed on Tableaus website are somewhat trivial compared to what the software is capable of. The true power of the software is the ability to explore many dimensions of the dataset all at once. Edward Tufte stated: "Graphics are at their best when they represents very dense and rich datasets." This is easy to achieve using Tableau. The company is very open to suggestions for improvements in the interface and in the feature set. They implemented in the first release alot of functionality I requested during the beta test phase. I have recieved two upgrades in the first year and an expecting another in the near furture. The President of the company visited and we had a great talk. I would love to give him example plots of my data for their web-site but I cannot as all the data is propietary. Is Tableau software the next Google. Of course not. That is simply a stupid, idiotic statement obviously made to draw attention to the post. But don't let that detract from what is a great piece of software if you have the right problems to solve.
Let's see. I use Google 20 times a day, and that's just a ballpark guess. Some days, way more, some days, very little.
It takes 2 seconds to use, it's free, I read the news, I use Froogle, and I occasionally do newsgroup searches for some stuff.
Hmmm. I mine a relational database probably less than once a month. Although I was part of a data warehousing project for 6 months, my SQL abilities have quickly deteriorated. I'd say that occasionally, I still use Excel to figure out some formulas, add some numbers, or use Text to Columns to occasionally get a bunch of text to line up nice and neat. Let's say that Excel gets used about once per week.
My needs for a graphical data mining tool are far less than once a week... probably on the order of twice per year, and that's being generous.
Will I be shelling out $1000 for Tableau's product? Doubtful. In fact, I doubt that my former employer would buy any more than a dozen licenses to help a small minority within a group of several hundred people.
With that in mind, I wonder why you think that Tableau could be the next Google? I know people that are computer illiterate, but yet they've at least heard of Google.com. That same thing won't be said for Tableau.
-- No sig for you!
What makes this product appear on slashdot and get publicity ?
:
- They are from Stanford
How can a standalone application be the next google ? Does the author think millions of users around the world use their software ?
It is obvious that this is a marketing effort.
Possible scenario
Tableau Software Marketing : we need publicity, and we want it for free.
Roland : I write great stuff about your software.
Timothy : I send it to slashdot
Tableau doesn't say who are its customers, [...]
Look at their brochure: one samble uses a Starbucks cube.
And on the customers page, the world's largest Internet search provider is quite obvious.
Contrary to many other posters, I don't think this software is crap. The thing just is, it's nothing new. OLAP (on-line analytical processing) and other business intelligence tools, even offline ones like BusinessObjects, have had these sort of features for a while.
So, in the end, it seems like just another business intelligence software package.
this is what I saw on their website:
"This account has surpassed its bandwidth allocation at the present time. You may reach the account administrator at www@www.tableausoftware.com"
Another Google? Ha!
This is not my sig.
This is the next "google".
ReportNet Demo Online
no one can beat google !
Chris ,
Php Programmers.
This is just a fucking commercial!
I'm sorry, is this the story about the doctor who claimed his wife was killed by the one armed man?
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Tableau is the next Tableau.
I hate sigs.
what crap.
he's providing a useful service - collating information and providing access to it. how is this any different to a newspaper or magazine's articles.
in this "digital age" anyone is welcome to publish on the net. this guy is doing well because he's good at what he does. more power to him.
go and do something useful yourself instead of wasting your breath telling others how to behave.
http://www.acooke.org
please allow me to use your "logic" and ask:
"Will the new Evian water be succesfull and become the next Rain-Water ?"
or
"Will the new Posche911 be succesfull and become the next VW-Beetle ?"
"There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action." Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
In other news: According to this article by SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER's John Cook, MS Excel is now an "old-fashioned" database like Oracle. So, everything in this article about Tableau should be taken in context of his great understanding of databases. God, I love it when reporters are such experts in subjects they write about. LOL
You STILL have to know what you're doing. Shit! When are they going to come up with one I can just think questions at and have it give me answers?
You know, once upon a time I seriously got a lot of my news from Slashdot.
Then I discovered RSS, and realized that this site is over a week behind, and full of crap comments.
Not only that, you have blatant redundant traffic whores like Roland Pikachu.
I can't believe you let Pikachu post some crap software that does little more than Excel chart macros and let him call it 'the next Google'. Hey, I've got an article idea: "Longhorn: The next Linux?". Please go to my site and visit my sponsors...
Hey I know, why not advertise OSDN crap on Pikachu's site!
Seriously TacoMan, CowboyBob, get a flippin clue. You need to change something, because *Slashdot* is -1, redundant. Maybe you don't care anymore b/c Slashdot pays your bills?
Your site SUCKS! I have removed AfterSlash from my aggregator. See ya, wouldn't wanna be ya!
isn't this just a lame approximation to Spotfire? http://www.spotfire.com/ -b
Reading the summary, I was intriqued, cautiosly hopeful, ready to get excited. But their web site is woefully inadequate and the other links had very little more info.
I work for a small IP company. We have at least a dozen people, probably 2-3x that, who could use what this sounded like it would be. But I don't see what I was promised. I see...
A GUI front end to databases. Better than OO, but still...
A MS-only app (we're 80% linux, 10% Win and 10% Mac on the desktop). Bzzzt.
They want real money for this. Didn't see a free trial.
A this point I can't tell who their target audience is, other than MS-based, frustrated database and Access/Excel users with too much moneyt and too few clues. They could be the best things since google, but they seemingly don't want me to know.
"Is Tableau The Next Google?"
I didn't know Google was done being Google?
SIG: TAKE OFF EVERY 'CAPTAIN'!!
I perform my useful service on e2. Here, I just wank :) Seriously though I provide useful questions here as well, and useful answers. And I'm annoyed at the link whoring, so I said something about it. Turns out we have pretty free speech here, which is always nice...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Exactly! timothy is doing a very pathetic "editor" job today. Is he even reading the submissions today???
This company is just like the hundreds of other "data visualization solutions" out there today. Trust me, I use Access, SQL, Minitab, and Excel every day, and NONE of them can fill the need for me to ANALYZE the data I'm looking at. I can slice and dice data a hundred different ways, but unless I know exactly what I'm doing and am applying proper statistical methods to my slicing and dicing of data, it's totally worthless to have some fancy graphing application making pretty charts for me.
Besides, submitting your own story to Slashdot is like voting for yourself in a fifth-grade election. It doesn't matter if you think you're the shit, it's only what the majority thinks that matters, and already the threads on this story seem to indicate that this lame-ass story should never have been posted to Slashdot.
Dirk Gently anyone?
Why do you hope the editors are getting something from his prolific submissions? Do they deserve to profit in any way, if the readers (or, as it seems, a large number of them) are unhappy?
/.ers of the World, Unite!
Slashdot should be all about us, the readers. If we weren't here, there would be no reason for it to exist. So if you're sick of it, do something about it -- send angry emails, go away and post on a different board, burn down your neighbor's garage in protest -- whatever will get the editors' attention. But don't hope that at least they might profit just because you feel you're getting f*cked over. If you don't like what they're doing, put 'em against the wall, and put Roland up there too if you want.
I'm not good in groups. It's difficult to work in a group when you're omnipotent. - Q
Pagerank was good enough in its original form to do a really good job of putting the most relevant of the 30000 web pages that match your query on page one, and as they keep tweaking it it keeps getting better (though much of the tweaking is simply to prevent advertisers from exploiting Pagerank to grant artificially high status to pages that are inherently uninteresting.) So the amount of my time it takes to find something is much less, because it's almost always the top half of the first page, and I don't have to wade around through uninteresting stuff to find what I want (even though I don't ever bother with the "I Feel Lucky" button.)
The only thing close to Google's quality that I've seen was Northern Lights, which tried to do some value-added categorization that grouped semantically similar results together, but it was a bit slower, didn't have as many pages indexed, and didn't make it financially (I think it eventually sold itself to businesses and the CIA or something.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks