7 ms·

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 (spre

by 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.
  - r00fus 11y ago
    Which level of office suite do you need to get this tool?
    - pjob 11y ago
      It's free, offered as a standalone service separate from Office. You just need to sign up with an email address from a non-free provider. https://powerbi.microsoft.com https://powerbi.microsoft.com Disclaimer: I work for Microsoft.
      - belzebub 11y ago
        It didn't work well in safari unfortunately. I use Tableau often so I'd like to see a competitive offering.
        WhitneyLand 11y ago
        What part didn't work well for you? It's intentionally designed to work with all modern browsers.
      - krmmalik 11y ago
        Any idea when the mac version is coming, if at all?
        pjob 11y ago
        I'm not sure about the Desktop app, but the web app should work in any modern browser today. Features are generally prioritized using user feedback, and this is one of the top suggestions on the ideas site: https://ideas.powerbi.com/forums/265200-power-bi-ideas/suggestions/7546645-power-bi-designer-for-mac https://ideas.powerbi.com/forums/265200-power-bi-ideas/sugge...
nevi-me 11y ago
Nail on the head regarding either selling a lot cheap, or little at high price. They went for the latter as you mention. I manage software licenses at my employer, and have been put off the price of Tableau, and the inflexibility they have. We're a consulting house, and mostly use Qlik. We started using Tableau last year. The problem for us is that as a consulting house, our staff turnover rate is high (as expected I suppose), and this doesn't work well with Tableau's named license model. We've run into troubles where we reassigned licenses after people either left projects using Tableau, or left our company altogether. They ended up forcing us to buy extra licenses, which I was unhappy with. My stance since then has been to avoid buying more licenses. We're getting our team skilled up more on web-based viz, so we can reduce our dependence on desktop applications.
- toomuchtodo 11y ago
  > My stance since then has been to avoid buying more licenses. We're getting our team skilled up more on web-based viz, so we can reduce our dependence on desktop applications. Anecdotal, but I've seen this happen several times with clients who previously used Tableau.
  - nevi-me 11y ago
    It's a bit ridiculous. We get global discounts, but even then we still end up concluding that it's expensive. We only have desktop and online licenses, server licenses are rooftop crazy.
    - toomuchtodo 11y ago
      My last gig paid high five figures for a server license, and after a year of trying to get it to work as wanted, we threw it out and wrote our own in-house web solution with open source tools.
- phillc73 11y ago
  Would you consider building the visualisations yourself with something like R and Shiny? Self host the server, develop in-house, no more Tableau like problems. I was working on a project where the client wanted to use Tableau and I pushed instead for Shiny, which is the way we went. Quite happy with the decision.
7952 11y ago
> desktop application for business intelligence and analytics I tried to buy the desktop app a few months ago and just got bogged down with the sales guy. They tried to sell the server products (with very high per-user pricing) when all I needed was 1 desktop licence and the free viewer. It was difficult to work out if they were a consultancy, a service, or selling a product. I think those things are in conflict with one another and make it difficult to understand the level of commitment and risk.
TWAndrews 11y ago
or very little of it for a lot of money. Website design suggests the latter In the BI market, Tableau is very much one of the low-cost, high volume players. They've done a great job getting into lots of people's hands, the question has always been whether or not they can roll the volume of cheap(ish) single user licenses into large enterprise-type deals.
243464646 11y ago
I used to work at a company where, under duress, I had to push tableau to its limits. My company spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on it. The main use was to provide reports on the data created by the application we sold. It would be great if it just stayed as a better version of the excel chart maker. Instead, it was seen in my company as a way to replace programmers. All of these types of applications have the same flaws: They sell a dream that you can turn a complex task that requires experts, into a simple task that anyone can do. In reality, you either have a simple application that doesn't do much, or an extremely complex application that still doesn't offer the performance and flexibility of just using an expert. You end up creating a programming via drag and drop application that is more complicated to learn than actual programming. You replace general programmers with useless tableau specialists. It took the tableau experts weeks to do what a programmer could do in days when complex requirements came up. Most requirements were complex. Tableau Server is very, very slow and requires massive resources to run. Tableau had to run the full, unfiltered query so that it could generate filter lists with all of the possible options. This query was often too large to run.
- chris_wot 11y ago
  I would love to see a profile trace to see what queries were being run!

by gomox 11y ago

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.
- r00fus 11y ago
  Which level of office suite do you need to get this tool?
  - pjob 11y ago
    It's free, offered as a standalone service separate from Office. You just need to sign up with an email address from a non-free provider. https://powerbi.microsoft.com https://powerbi.microsoft.com Disclaimer: I work for Microsoft.
    - belzebub 11y ago
      It didn't work well in safari unfortunately. I use Tableau often so I'd like to see a competitive offering.
      - WhitneyLand 11y ago
        What part didn't work well for you? It's intentionally designed to work with all modern browsers.
    - krmmalik 11y ago
      Any idea when the mac version is coming, if at all?
      - pjob 11y ago
        I'm not sure about the Desktop app, but the web app should work in any modern browser today. Features are generally prioritized using user feedback, and this is one of the top suggestions on the ideas site: https://ideas.powerbi.com/forums/265200-power-bi-ideas/suggestions/7546645-power-bi-designer-for-mac https://ideas.powerbi.com/forums/265200-power-bi-ideas/sugge...

nevi-me 11y ago

Nail on the head regarding either selling a lot cheap, or little at high price. They went for the latter as you mention. I manage software licenses at my employer, and have been put off the price of Tableau, and the inflexibility they have. We're a consulting house, and mostly use Qlik. We started using Tableau last year. The problem for us is that as a consulting house, our staff turnover rate is high (as expected I suppose), and this doesn't work well with Tableau's named license model. We've run into troubles where we reassigned licenses after people either left projects using Tableau, or left our company altogether. They ended up forcing us to buy extra licenses, which I was unhappy with. My stance since then has been to avoid buying more licenses. We're getting our team skilled up more on web-based viz, so we can reduce our dependence on desktop applications.

toomuchtodo 11y ago
> My stance since then has been to avoid buying more licenses. We're getting our team skilled up more on web-based viz, so we can reduce our dependence on desktop applications. Anecdotal, but I've seen this happen several times with clients who previously used Tableau.
- nevi-me 11y ago
  It's a bit ridiculous. We get global discounts, but even then we still end up concluding that it's expensive. We only have desktop and online licenses, server licenses are rooftop crazy.
  - toomuchtodo 11y ago
    My last gig paid high five figures for a server license, and after a year of trying to get it to work as wanted, we threw it out and wrote our own in-house web solution with open source tools.
phillc73 11y ago
Would you consider building the visualisations yourself with something like R and Shiny? Self host the server, develop in-house, no more Tableau like problems. I was working on a project where the client wanted to use Tableau and I pushed instead for Shiny, which is the way we went. Quite happy with the decision.

7952 11y ago

> desktop application for business intelligence and analytics I tried to buy the desktop app a few months ago and just got bogged down with the sales guy. They tried to sell the server products (with very high per-user pricing) when all I needed was 1 desktop licence and the free viewer. It was difficult to work out if they were a consultancy, a service, or selling a product. I think those things are in conflict with one another and make it difficult to understand the level of commitment and risk.

TWAndrews 11y ago

or very little of it for a lot of money. Website design suggests the latter In the BI market, Tableau is very much one of the low-cost, high volume players. They've done a great job getting into lots of people's hands, the question has always been whether or not they can roll the volume of cheap(ish) single user licenses into large enterprise-type deals.

243464646 11y ago

I used to work at a company where, under duress, I had to push tableau to its limits. My company spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on it. The main use was to provide reports on the data created by the application we sold. It would be great if it just stayed as a better version of the excel chart maker. Instead, it was seen in my company as a way to replace programmers. All of these types of applications have the same flaws: They sell a dream that you can turn a complex task that requires experts, into a simple task that anyone can do. In reality, you either have a simple application that doesn't do much, or an extremely complex application that still doesn't offer the performance and flexibility of just using an expert. You end up creating a programming via drag and drop application that is more complicated to learn than actual programming. You replace general programmers with useless tableau specialists. It took the tableau experts weeks to do what a programmer could do in days when complex requirements came up. Most requirements were complex. Tableau Server is very, very slow and requires massive resources to run. Tableau had to run the full, unfiltered query so that it could generate filter lists with all of the possible options. This query was often too large to run.

chris_wot 11y ago
I would love to see a profile trace to see what queries were being run!