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."
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...
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.
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...
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.
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.
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'.
What, you mean like k5 has? Gosh, that'd _never_ work!
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).
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
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.'"
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.
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?)
"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.