8 ms·

It gets worse than the comments I’m reading are saying. They’re implying that you could get there with marketing. But the thing is, you aren’t competing with Ex

It gets worse than the comments I’m reading are saying. They’re implying that you could get there with marketing. But the thing is, you aren’t competing with Excel. You’re competing with PowerBI, Tableau, Splunk, ELK, and Jupyter, but without any of the enterprise or scaling selling points. So this is a cool demo of a way to define charts once you have the data mostly there, but I don’t think it will scale to very large data volumes. With no way to hook into some already-scaled query engine, you won’t have much use by people that need to analyze production data. If this was very performant compared to Excel, then that would be a use case that could get you a niche while trying to build out the scale and interoperability required for successful BI tools.

disordinary 6y ago
I haven't downloaded the demo, but Splink, ELK, SumoLogic, whatever, and even visualisation tools like PowerBI, Tableau, Grafana, etc. are all complicated and need a lot of effort to setup and learn. A lot of businesses rely on excel for their data, just like they rely on outlook for a CRM. There is probably a market for a solution which runs on your desktop without too much fuss, and sits somewhere between excel and big data.
d--b 6y ago
The way I talk about it in person is this is the "last mile for your data". The problem you have in Tableau, Splunk and all of them, is that you can do a shit load of heavy processing, but then the frontend is not very flexible. As in you can't do basic maths AFTER the data's been processed. In fact, all of these tool will allow you to download a CSV file for further processing in Excel. This is the part I want to compete with. If that makes sense.
- Olreich 6y ago
  > As in you can't do basic maths AFTER the data's been processed. That's not true at all. It's just a different query language to yours and a different methodology to utilizing it. All the big BI and SIEM tools have post-processing capabilities able to do statistics at the Excel level, typically by creating new columns in the dataset. PowerBI has an excel-like function system for calculated columns. Tableau has a cross between Basic and Excel functions for calculated columns. Splunk and ELK are the standouts for letting you directly modify columns in their query languages, but the same sort of functions exist. In all of these tools, you can extend the query language as well through a plugin system, so for situations where you need a full programming language, there is an escape hatch (though a hard one to use). > further processing in Excel. This is the part I want to compete with. If you want to compete with Excel, you're going to have to get on its level. Specifically, the JavaScript must go. The reason big companies use Excel is because they have a couple of people at the company in the reporting jobs that can handle some programming, but most of the data entry and management has to be done by people who wouldn't know where to begin if you sat them down in a programming environment (IT gets called when people accidentally end up in the visual basic environment in Excel). The majority of users do not want to live in a programming environment, so by having that be the primary interface, you're cutting the already small potential user base by another order of magnitude with the JavaScript environment. The advantage you get for an Excel-like query language is familiarity to the potential user base, less threatening environment, and additional control over the interface with the user (programming languages are generally poor interfaces, and JavaScript is no exception).
  - d--b 6y ago
    Re: Tableau et al. I don't agree but that's just my point of view. Having worked with Excel all my life, I am probably spoiled. I don't understand how people get by with Tableau... Re: Javascript, yes I wish there was something better out there. But unfortunately, there's not, and I don't really have the time to build it.

disordinary 6y ago

I haven't downloaded the demo, but Splink, ELK, SumoLogic, whatever, and even visualisation tools like PowerBI, Tableau, Grafana, etc. are all complicated and need a lot of effort to setup and learn. A lot of businesses rely on excel for their data, just like they rely on outlook for a CRM. There is probably a market for a solution which runs on your desktop without too much fuss, and sits somewhere between excel and big data.

d--b 6y ago

The way I talk about it in person is this is the "last mile for your data". The problem you have in Tableau, Splunk and all of them, is that you can do a shit load of heavy processing, but then the frontend is not very flexible. As in you can't do basic maths AFTER the data's been processed. In fact, all of these tool will allow you to download a CSV file for further processing in Excel. This is the part I want to compete with. If that makes sense.

Olreich 6y ago
> As in you can't do basic maths AFTER the data's been processed. That's not true at all. It's just a different query language to yours and a different methodology to utilizing it. All the big BI and SIEM tools have post-processing capabilities able to do statistics at the Excel level, typically by creating new columns in the dataset. PowerBI has an excel-like function system for calculated columns. Tableau has a cross between Basic and Excel functions for calculated columns. Splunk and ELK are the standouts for letting you directly modify columns in their query languages, but the same sort of functions exist. In all of these tools, you can extend the query language as well through a plugin system, so for situations where you need a full programming language, there is an escape hatch (though a hard one to use). > further processing in Excel. This is the part I want to compete with. If you want to compete with Excel, you're going to have to get on its level. Specifically, the JavaScript must go. The reason big companies use Excel is because they have a couple of people at the company in the reporting jobs that can handle some programming, but most of the data entry and management has to be done by people who wouldn't know where to begin if you sat them down in a programming environment (IT gets called when people accidentally end up in the visual basic environment in Excel). The majority of users do not want to live in a programming environment, so by having that be the primary interface, you're cutting the already small potential user base by another order of magnitude with the JavaScript environment. The advantage you get for an Excel-like query language is familiarity to the potential user base, less threatening environment, and additional control over the interface with the user (programming languages are generally poor interfaces, and JavaScript is no exception).
- d--b 6y ago
  Re: Tableau et al. I don't agree but that's just my point of view. Having worked with Excel all my life, I am probably spoiled. I don't understand how people get by with Tableau... Re: Javascript, yes I wish there was something better out there. But unfortunately, there's not, and I don't really have the time to build it.