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.
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.'"
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.
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.
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'.
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 $1000.
Moo.
So much fun. And so, so utterly useless 95% of the time.
I've been working on particle systems for large scale data visualization. Even got some working code up -- see this for the results of my DNS server research (every particle is a host). It's...OK. The problem is that while a good chunk of our brain is devoted to visual processing, a good chunk of what we do is decidedly abstract and non-visual. Playing across these mental lines can usefully employ underutilized computation frameworks, but that doesn't mean that it will.
Think -- crypto on a GPU, not particularly fast (floating point and crypto only work well together in one extraordinarily obscure context).
It's alot of fun to play in this domain, and occasionally the results are really really useful (like this rendering of failed entropy generators). But...yeah. Way too often, your output isn't as useful as a quickly resortable log file.
That's what makes it such a great challenge, of course. Few other fields show themselves to be empty of value so late in the dev cycle. (Biotech people have it worse, of course.)
--Dan
This guy, Roland Piquepaille, plugs products in his blogs and submits links to Slashdot, which, incredibly, are accepted. Check out his other posts, he has had a submission accepted every day for the last 4 days, all the submissions are the same style and format, and all have a link to some new product. STOP FEEDING HIM PAGE VIEWS!
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Seriously it represents a great product, provided it isn't swallowed by M$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
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
What!!!
[Rubs eyes in disbelief]
That's all they know how to do! The rest of us get paid to stop them and coerce them into using more reasonable tools. As far as pretty pictures of data go, try Spotfire. It's been around for years, and was never a "Google."
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
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.'"
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
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?)
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.
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
"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.
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.