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I don't know what Tableau Software is and I found it pretty amazing that when I Google it I could still not figure it out because all the results were about the

I don't know what Tableau Software is and I found it pretty amazing that when I Google it I could still not figure it out because all the results were about the stock price. I think people might be focusing too much on stock price is Googling a company's name doesn't result in seeing the company's website on the first page of results.....

gabriel34 11y ago
Tableau makes software for the presentation layer of business intelligence systems (basically graphs and dashboards) I have limited experience with it (only POCs), but I liked it very much. They usually figure well in Gartner rankings
sologoub 11y ago
Tableau is a visualization software that you can bolt on top of many different data sources, from spreadsheets to BI tools and even AWS RedShift to get awesome looking dashboards and interactive visuals. They are/were extremely popular with many sales organizations for internal dashboarding and even some media outlets used their stuff for public websites. Sad to see this state of things for them, as the product was true good at one point. That said, I have not touched it in 3-4 years, so not sure how competitive it is now.
- floppydisk 11y ago
  They still are popular, especially in the government contracting world. It's almost a mandatory requirement their business analysts use Tableau when creating dashboards for clients.
- cscharenberg 11y ago
  The product is awesome. I made some really neat visualizations and analyses with it during an MBA project using the 15-day trial. But it's ridiculously expensive - $1000 per year with some real limitations on how many data sources you can connect. If I could dabble with it for $50/year I would. $1000 though? That limits their market tremendously to big companies only. It's hard enough to get an $80 tool approved. -- Looks like they give it free for students now, which is cool: https://www.tableau.com/academic/student https://www.tableau.com/academic/student. But after learning it, there's no path to bring the software with them when they move to actual companies, because of the cost.
  - TheLogothete 11y ago
    Tableau is an enterprise product and it's one the cheaper ones out there. You can't offer that kind of a product for $50/year.
    - CamperBob2 11y ago
      You can't, but Microsoft can. That's what the rest of the world might call a "bad omen."
    - greggyb 11y ago
      Power BI, Microsoft's answer to it is $10/mo - yes, not $50/year, but a lot closer to that than to $1,000. The vis layer doesn't need to be expensive.
      - TheLogothete 11y ago
        PowerBI has nowhere near the capabilities of Tableau. On top of that, PowerBI is subsidized in order to funnel customers for SQL Server.
        WhitneyLand 11y ago
        What's are some of the biggest things missing in Power BI compared to Tableau?
        greggyb 11y ago
        Tableau offers a richer end-user customization interface. Power BI offers custom visuals, but these are definitely developer-only at this point. The behavior you get from the baked in pieces is more rigidly defined than that from Tableau (monthly releases address these things one item at a time). Out of the box mapping is miles better in Tableau. Overall Tableau is more fully-featured than Power BI. Tableau aims to be a complete BI presentation layer. Power BI is positioned as the self-service and personalized consumption component as a part of a larger BI presentation layer. Microsoft would prefer that the entirety of the BI stack be made up of their technologies, but Power BI can consume other data sources, and its reports can be embedded in other apps, so it fits into other technologies as well. We could go feature-by-feature and Tableau would win the majority of presentation sophistication bullets (more fine-grained control of display, filtering, interactions - richer collection of built-in visualizations). The differentiator for Power BI is more on the self-service end. Personalized dashboards (dashboard and report are two distinct concepts in Power BI) can be trivially created from published reports. Customized reports can easily be extended from published reports and datasets. There's a strong collaboration framework based on Office 365 groups and with lessons learned from SharePoint. There is also a pretty seamless upgrade path. Power Pivot models can currently be promoted to SSAS, and the expectation is for the same to be possible with Power BI models (all the same backing database technology). I hate to be so vague, but there's a lot to both products. I'd be happy to dive deeper into some specific cases if you've got questions.
- vailripper 11y ago
  We're using them for a client, and pretty much every client I've worked with lately is using them. I think they'll be just fine, it's still a good product.
  - sologoub 11y ago
    The AWS RedShift integration was a really good move, as one of the reasons we did not adopt them at my previous company was the requirement that the data set fit in memory of the server. With RedShift, you offload the actual crunching to the db that can handle billions of rows, and then visualize the results.
gomox 11y ago
Tableau is a surprisingly good desktop application for business intelligence and analytics that, IMO, grew too big for its own good. You plug it into data (spreadsheets, databases, you name it) and it makes it very simple (drag-and-drop simple) to crunch some numbers and produce interesting graphs, visualizations and analysis. Some clever stuff they had was (early-RoR-style) guessing of data semantics based on heuristics (Column labeled "date"? probably worth grouping by months. Number pairs like -0.3242,0.12345 ? probably worth plotting on a map). I have used trial and educational versions in the past and was always pretty impressed with the ease of use and the results. The product itself was > $1k so I never actually purchased a license. Even though I didn't follow the strategy very closely, from what I've run into it seems lke their offerings were all over the place. I saw a local newspaper using a hosted Tableau product to display data visualizations on their pages (the kind of visualizations made by a company whose DNA is desktop apps, so kind of underwhelming). Their website is all about Gartner and enterprisey lingo. The product itself is, well, some advanced version of Excel. This means you either sell a lot of it very cheap, or very little of it for a lot of money. Website design suggests the latter. Too bad it seems to not be working. I'm honestly sad to see them do badly as I think the product was really innovative and it really changed my way of thinking about report building and analytics tools.
- PaulHoule 11y ago
  It's a pretty good product but everybody and his brother sells analytics and visualization tools, most of the companies that have been around a while sell a few different tools since they've grown by acquisition. Tableau is more differentiated than it looks, but it doesn't look very differentiated. If Microsoft ever gets around to making many of the "smart" features in Excel actually work (i.e. csv import and automatically choosing what kind of graph to make) they will have nothing to stand on. I'm just waiting for the street to realize that Hortonworks and their competitors also have zero moat, and if anything, a GUI interface for a Hadoop cluster is value subtraction in the age of devops.
  - mcgannon2007 11y ago
    Microsoft now has PowerBI in its Office suite that is pretty powerful. Its a Tableau competitor that I believe is a big reason that their stock is falling. It integrates with Excel, Access, etc. and a ton of different other non-Microsoft services.
rockdiesel 11y ago
I find that hard to believe unless you were searching just on Google News. Searching "tableau" in Google stills shows their website as well as a large knowledge graph on the right hand side which tells you exactly what the company is about. There's News results at the top of the page, but there's still plenty of information, including the company website, on the first page of results. http://i.imgur.com/tV89FoZ.png http://i.imgur.com/tV89FoZ.png
- tomasien 11y ago
  https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=tableau%20software https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&e...
  - rockdiesel 11y ago
    Your link still shows tableau.com as the #1 organic result for me. Do you mind screen grabbing the results you are seeing?
wbeckler 11y ago
This will happen for google searches where there's a hot news story that is more likely to be what people are looking for. For spiking searches, Google automatically applies a principle called "Query Deserves Freshness" and they rank pages that are more fresh. So the brand site and wikipedia and other more authoritative explanations of the brand will be temporarily deranked.

gabriel34 11y ago

Tableau makes software for the presentation layer of business intelligence systems (basically graphs and dashboards) I have limited experience with it (only POCs), but I liked it very much. They usually figure well in Gartner rankings

sologoub 11y ago

Tableau is a visualization software that you can bolt on top of many different data sources, from spreadsheets to BI tools and even AWS RedShift to get awesome looking dashboards and interactive visuals. They are/were extremely popular with many sales organizations for internal dashboarding and even some media outlets used their stuff for public websites. Sad to see this state of things for them, as the product was true good at one point. That said, I have not touched it in 3-4 years, so not sure how competitive it is now.

floppydisk 11y ago
They still are popular, especially in the government contracting world. It's almost a mandatory requirement their business analysts use Tableau when creating dashboards for clients.
cscharenberg 11y ago
The product is awesome. I made some really neat visualizations and analyses with it during an MBA project using the 15-day trial. But it's ridiculously expensive - $1000 per year with some real limitations on how many data sources you can connect. If I could dabble with it for $50/year I would. $1000 though? That limits their market tremendously to big companies only. It's hard enough to get an $80 tool approved. -- Looks like they give it free for students now, which is cool: https://www.tableau.com/academic/student https://www.tableau.com/academic/student. But after learning it, there's no path to bring the software with them when they move to actual companies, because of the cost.
- TheLogothete 11y ago
  Tableau is an enterprise product and it's one the cheaper ones out there. You can't offer that kind of a product for $50/year.
  - CamperBob2 11y ago
    You can't, but Microsoft can. That's what the rest of the world might call a "bad omen."
  - greggyb 11y ago
    Power BI, Microsoft's answer to it is $10/mo - yes, not $50/year, but a lot closer to that than to $1,000. The vis layer doesn't need to be expensive.
    - TheLogothete 11y ago
      PowerBI has nowhere near the capabilities of Tableau. On top of that, PowerBI is subsidized in order to funnel customers for SQL Server.
      - WhitneyLand 11y ago
        What's are some of the biggest things missing in Power BI compared to Tableau?
        greggyb 11y ago
        Tableau offers a richer end-user customization interface. Power BI offers custom visuals, but these are definitely developer-only at this point. The behavior you get from the baked in pieces is more rigidly defined than that from Tableau (monthly releases address these things one item at a time). Out of the box mapping is miles better in Tableau. Overall Tableau is more fully-featured than Power BI. Tableau aims to be a complete BI presentation layer. Power BI is positioned as the self-service and personalized consumption component as a part of a larger BI presentation layer. Microsoft would prefer that the entirety of the BI stack be made up of their technologies, but Power BI can consume other data sources, and its reports can be embedded in other apps, so it fits into other technologies as well. We could go feature-by-feature and Tableau would win the majority of presentation sophistication bullets (more fine-grained control of display, filtering, interactions - richer collection of built-in visualizations). The differentiator for Power BI is more on the self-service end. Personalized dashboards (dashboard and report are two distinct concepts in Power BI) can be trivially created from published reports. Customized reports can easily be extended from published reports and datasets. There's a strong collaboration framework based on Office 365 groups and with lessons learned from SharePoint. There is also a pretty seamless upgrade path. Power Pivot models can currently be promoted to SSAS, and the expectation is for the same to be possible with Power BI models (all the same backing database technology). I hate to be so vague, but there's a lot to both products. I'd be happy to dive deeper into some specific cases if you've got questions.
vailripper 11y ago
We're using them for a client, and pretty much every client I've worked with lately is using them. I think they'll be just fine, it's still a good product.
- sologoub 11y ago
  The AWS RedShift integration was a really good move, as one of the reasons we did not adopt them at my previous company was the requirement that the data set fit in memory of the server. With RedShift, you offload the actual crunching to the db that can handle billions of rows, and then visualize the results.

gomox 11y ago

Tableau is a surprisingly good desktop application for business intelligence and analytics that, IMO, grew too big for its own good. You plug it into data (spreadsheets, databases, you name it) and it makes it very simple (drag-and-drop simple) to crunch some numbers and produce interesting graphs, visualizations and analysis. Some clever stuff they had was (early-RoR-style) guessing of data semantics based on heuristics (Column labeled "date"? probably worth grouping by months. Number pairs like -0.3242,0.12345 ? probably worth plotting on a map). I have used trial and educational versions in the past and was always pretty impressed with the ease of use and the results. The product itself was > $1k so I never actually purchased a license. Even though I didn't follow the strategy very closely, from what I've run into it seems lke their offerings were all over the place. I saw a local newspaper using a hosted Tableau product to display data visualizations on their pages (the kind of visualizations made by a company whose DNA is desktop apps, so kind of underwhelming). Their website is all about Gartner and enterprisey lingo. The product itself is, well, some advanced version of Excel. This means you either sell a lot of it very cheap, or very little of it for a lot of money. Website design suggests the latter. Too bad it seems to not be working. I'm honestly sad to see them do badly as I think the product was really innovative and it really changed my way of thinking about report building and analytics tools.

PaulHoule 11y ago
It's a pretty good product but everybody and his brother sells analytics and visualization tools, most of the companies that have been around a while sell a few different tools since they've grown by acquisition. Tableau is more differentiated than it looks, but it doesn't look very differentiated. If Microsoft ever gets around to making many of the "smart" features in Excel actually work (i.e. csv import and automatically choosing what kind of graph to make) they will have nothing to stand on. I'm just waiting for the street to realize that Hortonworks and their competitors also have zero moat, and if anything, a GUI interface for a Hadoop cluster is value subtraction in the age of devops.
- mcgannon2007 11y ago
  Microsoft now has PowerBI in its Office suite that is pretty powerful. Its a Tableau competitor that I believe is a big reason that their stock is falling. It integrates with Excel, Access, etc. and a ton of different other non-Microsoft services.

rockdiesel 11y ago

I find that hard to believe unless you were searching just on Google News. Searching "tableau" in Google stills shows their website as well as a large knowledge graph on the right hand side which tells you exactly what the company is about. There's News results at the top of the page, but there's still plenty of information, including the company website, on the first page of results. http://i.imgur.com/tV89FoZ.png http://i.imgur.com/tV89FoZ.png

tomasien 11y ago
https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=tableau%20software https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&e...
- rockdiesel 11y ago
  Your link still shows tableau.com as the #1 organic result for me. Do you mind screen grabbing the results you are seeing?

wbeckler 11y ago

This will happen for google searches where there's a hot news story that is more likely to be what people are looking for. For spiking searches, Google automatically applies a principle called "Query Deserves Freshness" and they rank pages that are more fresh. So the brand site and wikipedia and other more authoritative explanations of the brand will be temporarily deranked.