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

Killer app?

[yebb]

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.

Re:Killer app?

[Gorobei]

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.

Not a real killer app - we've had data mining / visualization / slice 'n' dice packages for over twenty years now. Sadly, none of them ever expand beyond a niche market because:

1) Most users can't interpret 2-D data (other than simple time series and quartile-type histograms.) Many people can't even interpret 2-D data (ask a person to explain a graph of unemployment claims data and you will be unpleasantly surprised.)

2) Most firms that examine complex, high-dimensional data (e.g. insurance companies, wall-street banks, economic think-tanks,) already have seriously sophisticated, domain-tailored tools. Wow, end-of-summer sales of pencils are up in sales district X - I wonder why? You don't think Staples already has some tools for correlation for back-to-school student buying with store-sales figures? Executives will greet this tool with a big yawn.

Incoherence

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Incoherence

[jdray]

Data is by definition structured!

data (used with a sing. or pl. verb)

Factual information, especially information organized for analysis or used to reason or make decisions.

Computer Science. Numerical or other information represented in a form suitable for processing by computer.

Values derived from scientific experiments.

Plural of datum.

Um... No it's not.

I doubt it...

[Number_1_Bigg$]

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...

Re:I doubt it...

[jdray]

I don't think you're missing anything. The only things these guys have in common with Google are a) they made a small leap in technology with an existing paradigm, and b) they used to work down the hall from the Google founders.

AFAIK, Google only cleaned up the look of web searching and started inserting search-specific ads into results pages. Not rocket science, just a good idea. It turned out that they had the right recipie, and they're on top for the foreseeable future.

But, then, maybe I'm just a curmudgeon...

just like before the crash

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

The "Next Google?"

[imag0]

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.

Not another google.

[daver_au]

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.

Re:Blog spam

[Tumbleweed]

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

Re: Specifically...

[Anonymous Coward]

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).

Re:WARNING: troll

[drinkypoo]

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.