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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."
Please careful with the Slashdotting http://www.oracleguy.ws/
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.
This leads to a legitimate, if somewhat controversial question: Why are "Bloggers" classified as "Journalists"? What makes Roland into such an expert on anything? Well, he has a blog about technology, he MUST be an expert! He's skill set? Well, his resume is NOT extraordinary. (Well, it is filled with phrases like "Animation of international groups", whatever the fuck that means). So, why is this guy given any credence? As another poster said earlier, this is SPAM!
I, personally, can think of a couple uses for this sort of technology. I know of at least one really awesome way I could use it at work (spotting compromised servers based on nmap scans, which is currently very difficult for a variety of reasons). I imagine marketing, sales, and management folks could think of a hundred more, since they also tend to work with huge volumes of structured data - so much data that it's tedious, error-prone, or flat-out impossible to go over it by hand. Specialized solutions exist, no question, but they are, of course, specialized. Wouldn't it be great if you could use one program to do it all? That's what Google has done for Internet searches.
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.
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.
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, I know. Submit a patch.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
> 1) The ability to highlight the area of a graph
/. homepage? This is nothing more than an undisguised press-release for a ho-hum startup company!
> and paste it into a spreadsheet and having it
> show up as real data, not graphics.
BFD! That is a trivial coding problem. This sounds like just another semi-pretty OLAP program. In fact, I have seen many, many infinitely more sophisticated graphical data mining tools that actually try to pull out the complex correlations in one or more dimensions rather than just colorizing some otherwise standard graphs.
Yes, I looked at their examples -- not much more than some simple charts -- could easily be included in the next version of Excel without making a dent in the already bloated size of the program.
That being said, for large companies, even a small increase in usability and insight can be worth paying $1000 for a couple of seats. Maybe also for some large research labs. But we are talking at most several thousand customers buying a handful of licenses yielding one time revenues (plus maybe some upgrades) of a couple of million dollars. A far, far cry from Googles ubiquity.
The only thing that they and Google founders have in common is that they got their PhD's at Stamford (along with thousands of others each year)
How the heck did a lame-ass article like this ever make it to the
I know it's hard to believe, but business people don't want to dump their database out into tab delimited format and graph their stuff in excel ( or crystal reports or [ insert name here ] )
... fluffers.
There are many companies that are built on just this premise and long before this company was even scribble on some wankers napkin. ( executive-dashboards.com, crystal reports, databeacon etc. )
This is pure marketing fluff. and what does that make us for even discussing this crap... that's right
This guy, Roland Piquepaille, plugs products in his blogs and submits links to Slashdot, which, incredibly, are accepted. Check out his other posts, he has had a submission accepted every day for the last 4 days, all the submissions are the same style and format, and all have a link to some new product. STOP FEEDING HIM PAGE VIEWS!
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Seriously it represents a great product, provided it isn't swallowed by M$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
Can we PLEASE get some slashcode additions to filter out Roland in the preferences!!! Worthless stories/blog spam like this need a filter!
I hope they're getting kickbacks from him, because I've now refused to subscribe to Slashdot because of this guy. Slashdot does nothing but whore his blog for him. Thanks Slashdot editors, you've made someone who's read here for two years not want to subscribe. Way to go!
Ah am not a crook! (\(-__-)/)
Geez! According to my pseudo-scientific Google search, this guy has had about 90 articles posted so far. Damn! We must also consider that Roland has no life and might only exist to blog and submit to Slashdot. From the looks of it, that's pretty likely. Aside from getting his articles accepted more often that the rest of us, he seems pretty normal as far as this reclusive /. population goes. I wonder how many rejections he's had. That would be a telling number!
US Democracy:The best person for the job (among These pre-selected choices...)
pagerank
Its simple yes, but not as trivial as you seem to suggest.
-ashot
You know, I was going to use the same acronym. I realize it's a bit difficult to get a better understanding of what problem they are trying to solve (that hasn't been tackled a thousand times before on an ad hoc basis by every programmer doing enterprise software) from a non-technical newspaper article and a marketing web-page. However, the biggest problem I have with the web page is not that they are trying to solve doesn't need solving, but that the example screen shots are so contrived with nice normalized tables and columns like "Market Size" and "Ship Method".
In my limited experience, databases in the real world come in two basic flavours:
If their software can make it possible for the outsourced VB programmer in Bangelore to make meaningful and colorful charts, that's quite a feat. I'm not holding my breath.
Waltz, nymph, for quick jigs vex Bud.
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.
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.
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 I think that most of it is a straight rip off of Lasata's Vision software which has been around for about ten years now... http://www.lasata.com.au/ And my criticism to tableau is twofold: - looks great in the demo, but what of real-world databases without a datadictionary for your api? - why only MS products? I really don't want to pay 1000$ + for an add-on that requires me to dump oracle or postgres into textfiles ....
In short, the product is not innovative and it is extremeley limited in platform. As many of you know and remark, these guys are waiting to cash out with Microsoft and have their add-on borged into xl and xs. Of course for more money you can get it borged into mssql....
ach man, these guys are cheesy and it is insulting to even imply a similarity with the genious and vision of Brin and Page.
-if at first you don't succeed, stay the heck away from paragliding.