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."

Comments

Blog spam

[iamdrscience]

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.

Re:Killer app?

[thrillbert]

You obviously did not take a look at their software and some of the presentations available on their site.

Let me just give you the one feature which I think makes this extremely useful:

• 1) The ability to highlight the area of a graph and paste it into a spreadsheet and having it show up as real data, not graphics.

Don't get me wrong. I'm a CLI type of guy, but the truth is that we live in a graphical world, and I get paid to provide users what they need to make their jobs easier.. I'm pretty sure this will help them.

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There are no data that cannot be plotted on a straight line if the axis are chosen correctly.

Re:Is slashdot the new livejournal?

[Fnkmaster]

Well, he can't write a story submission without a link to his blog because he is spamming Slashdot for ad impressions. And yes, he's an asshat, a terrible writer, a rehasher of stupid stories that are not informative, and he seems to have some strange relationship with the Slashdot editors (kickbacks?) that they keep posting his submissions, on a daily basis no less, without at least clipping out the damn links to his stupid blog.