10 ms·

Is Tableau Dead?

146 points by dsaavy 3y ago

MissTake 3y ago
Our renewal got Shanghaied by an extremely greedy and over zealous sales rep who injected himself between us and our renewals reps, and wanted to turn a sub $80k renewal into damn near $200k this year and $300k next. Needless to say it got nowhere fast and, by the time he gave up and threw us “back” to renewals, the damage had been done. We elected to do what they thought was unthinkable and we just walked away. My oh my, it was very, very good day, when I got to tell them to go f themselves.
- leetrout 3y ago
  This is about to be us with Heroku. Feels like software sales has just gotten worse for years now.
  - calciphus 3y ago
    Just Salesforce.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - CSMastermind 3y ago
    Heroku is one of those things that if someone tells me their still on it without a plan to migrate I question the executive leadership at their company. Shade of its former self, expensive, and there are plenty of better options. Really seems like the company is in zombie mode until it's eventual slow demise.
    - plufz 3y ago
      I haven’t used Heroku in a long time but I really liked the feeling of starting up a database and a container for the app with two clicks. Which are the main alternatives in that space today?
      - bantunes 3y ago
        Fly.io maybe?
      - mmaia 3y ago
        The best alternative I found is render.com It has this feeling of "just works", and documentation is pretty good.
      - realusername 3y ago
        I just use Dokku on a VPS and it works fine. Sure it might not scale but Heroku didn't either.
    - PanMan 3y ago
      I agree.. but I'm surprised how little Heroku alternatives have popped up yet.. There is new contestants, mostly focussed on more global deploys, but no "Heroku but maintained" that I know of.. yet.
      - MobileVet 3y ago
        We did a bake off 18 months ago and identified ~5 similar platforms at the time. Fly.io and Render were 2 of them. We chose Render and have been happy with things just chugging along as they were on Heroku. Their runtime seems to take up quite a bit more RAM, but the IAC is a great addition resulting in 100% consistent environments.
      - infecto 3y ago
        I am not surprised. There are a handful of competitors but I believe the ship has sailed. I am a complete AWS dunce but it's too easy for me to spin up an ECS with spot machines and run my python app on it. When Heroku hit the scene and for many years, there was no easy alternative. You had to go and provision your own machines to then setup.
        DanielHB 3y ago
        Is it just me or ECS is relatively complicated? I mean, it is no k8, but still you need to set up a lot of stuff to get it to work.
        dkersten 3y ago
        I actually gave up on AWS forever when trying to use ECS. It was incredibly complex and it kept failing to deploy, but cloudeatch only contained log entries for it about 20% of the time. All I could do was click redeploy over and over — sometimes there were logs, usually not. And they charged me for every single deploy. After a day and a $100 bill later, I gave up and used DigitalOcean’s hosted docker instead. I had it up she’d rubbing in under ten minutes and no bill other than the actual usage costs. Now I avoid AWS as much as I can. Of course my employers tend to be on AWS so sadly I can’t completely avoid it, but I do my best and would never recommend it anymore.
    - te_chris 3y ago
      I'm working with a company who are very happy on it currently. It still works really well for them, they're ok with the cost relative to the rest of their costs.
    - swat535 3y ago
      What better alternatives are there? I saw Fly.io and it doesn't even offer a managed database, not to mention the fact that they have had serious reliability issues. Heroku is pretty battle tested and mature at this point, though the feature development has stopped, I don't doubt Salesforce is now going to use it simply as a the "cloud" offering for their other products..
  - MobileVet 3y ago
    I would encourage you to find the exit ASAP from Heroku… we saw continual degradation of service and uptime during our last 2 years there.
- CobrastanJorji 3y ago
  One can safely assume Salesforce has very well made internal Tableau visualizations of Salepserson performance. That sort of failure would almost certainly show up with crisp drop shadows. It is a shame, however, that the behavior of the sales rep probably made the renewals rep's chart look bad if not worse.
  - rndmswethrwawy 3y ago
    They could have, but I can promise you that if they have Tableau visualizations _at all_ at this point, they're shit. Letting something "die on the vine" is the only way to describe Salesforce's Tableau acquisition.
  - blitzar 3y ago
    > the behavior of the sales rep probably made the sales rep chart for "outreach activity" tick up and the renewals rep's chart was fired because they didnt hit their target
  - toyg 3y ago
    > One can safely assume Salesforce has very well made internal Tableau visualizations of Salesperson performance. I can't decide whether this statement is ironic or not. Salesforce is just another big company, with committees and meetings and crisp charts that exist only to show numbers going up, not to actually identify anything as boring as actual operational performance.
  - justin66 3y ago
    > It is a shame, however, that the behavior of the sales rep probably made the renewals rep's chart look bad if not worse. Is the fate of commissioned salespeople to be eaten by other commissioned salespeople.
  - jncfhnb 3y ago
    Sales teams often punish reps for many things out of their control. It’s pretty dumb.
- stuckkeys 3y ago
  Just out curiosity, what did you end up replacing it with? Looking to shop for a client. They were hyped on Tableau.
  - topicseed 3y ago
    Superset works wonders
  - marcinzm 3y ago
    Depending on the use cases PowerBI and Looker.
  - prometheus76 3y ago
    We're a Power BI house with eight companies in a holding company. Power BI also has a high-security option, which is essential for us for security compliance requirements on our government contracts. We also have a blanket license so everyone can see the dashboards, and we're about to upgrade to Premium company-wide. It took some time for me to switch from Excel paradigm to Power BI paradigm, but once it clicked, I've never looked back.
- mathattack 3y ago
  The Salesforce reps just couldn’t help themselves. Too much Oracle in their DNA. Ruined the customer relationship, and encouraged the move to Microsoft and their “free” alternative.
- scrapcode 3y ago
  I'm in the enterprise procurement world and it's mind-boggling to me how many software companies in the past two years have forced themselves to $0 revenue from us by trying to double (or more!) their already exorbitant prices.
  - anon84873628 3y ago
    Is this greed, or a struggle for them to survive?
    - cutemonster 3y ago
      It's sometimes a good move and I've seen it recommended here at HN pretty often I think. look: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16477003 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16477003 "I've now 4X'd my pricing (from 3 figures to 4 figures a month!) and the customers got 10X better, complain less, I work less and earn more"
    - scrapcode 3y ago
      With certain requirements from large corporations switching from usage or license-based pricing to models such as charging per employee in the overall organization, it's hard to imagine it doesn't involve a little greed. It makes the choice even easier when clear alternatives are much more economical. Imagine for example you're a small shop with your own budget in an org the size of Alphabet with a couple of Java servers that you purchase support to the tune of $5k/year and then they all of a sudden want to charge $1,000,000/month because there are ~200k employees within your larger organization. It gets even more convoluted when you get into hardware support, where the support itself outside of warranty can be more expensive annually than replacing the hardware and getting N years of support with warranty.
Slackwise 3y ago
> Is Tableau dead? Yes, Salesforce consumes companies whole. Just like they did with Heroku and others.
- kevsim 3y ago
  Slack seems to be surviving thus far at least
  - barryrandall 3y ago
    They don't have any credible competition.
pinewurst 3y ago
I’m not sure this is totally on Salesforce as the Tableau product has gotten so sluggish and inflexible. At my last job I started dumping data from Tableau to CSV (don’t get me started on the crap CSVs that Tableau generates) and importing to R for analysis. Good riddance.
- Dyac 3y ago
  We have Tableau but I've never found it particularly useful, as most of what I do is very exploratory and Tableau seems more like a place to build final presentation of things that will just go to gather dust. I now use both of these tools below (no affiliation), which you might find interesting. [1] www.exploratory.io [2] www.count.co
- nomilk 3y ago
  I don't use Tableau but had similar feelings recently with Databricks. Tools like these are probably fine for folks who want more grunt than a laptop without needing to learn much about cloud, infrastructure or security. But for me, it feels like a straight jacket. It lets you get going quickly but at the expense of flexibility. Slowly but surely the warts become apparent. A year or two really isn't a lot of time (for an individual nor company) to invest in order to build long term skills in powerful tools that side step inflexible (and expensive) platforms.
- Rastonbury 3y ago
  Looking what they did to Heroku and are doing to Tableau, I'm not optimistic for Slack
kimi 3y ago
I don't know jack about Tableau, but if the alternative is Power BI, I got a feeling they may be safe. My current company sells telephony and call-center analytics for MS Teams using our software, and during pre-sales meeting, one of the staple questions is "So we can avoid Power BI entirely?" followed by a minor thanksgiving ceremony and presentation of credit card. I get a feeling it's not too dear to the hearts of its users.
- ako 3y ago
  Why do they want to avoid PowerBI?
  - antoine_b0ss 3y ago
    [dead]
  - kimi 3y ago
    I'm not sure, I just see it happen. To put things in context, our small claim to fame is anyway getting some aggregate data about lost calls and attempts that is not possible to produce in Power BI directly[1]. So it's likely that they would buy or not buy it even if it was based on Power BI itself. [1] https://www.queuemetrics.com/teams.jsp https://www.queuemetrics.com/teams.jsp
  - prometheus76 3y ago
    I'm going to hazard a guess based on my experience of being the one who brought it to my current employer after learning it at a previous employer: it's really hard to understand for awhile, especially coming from Excel. The paradigm required to build anything more than SUM or AVERAGE can be very unintuitive and feels almost like black magic. It takes a lot of trial and error and patience to finally grasp how Power BI handles calculations if you are used to the freedom of Excel. That being said, once it clicks, it feels like you are a magician, and you can do really advanced analytics on giant tables, which is great. We pull a bunch of data out of the guts of MS Project 2010 and do a lot of custom analysis on it. It took about two years to go from scratch to a set of reports that served everyone's needs that also required minimal maintenance. Then we got purchased by a larger company, so now the work is in rolling out a similar set of reports for the sister companies, as well as rolling them up into corporate-wide reports. It's a lot of fun.
thejosh 3y ago
Considering that when I asked about basic features, and bring told that the people interested/working on those left once Salesforce came in... Yeah.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
wenc 3y ago
I've been using Tableau since 2013 to deploy dashboards, which in my case are front ends to ML model output. (for me, I used it as a Streamlit before Streamlit existed) People think of Tableau as a dashboard tool, which it is. But it's also a great tool for doing EDA (exploratory data analysis) on multidimensional data. Instead of writing lots of seaborn/ggplot code (and having to remember the syntax), you can just move things around in Tableau in a fraction of the time. The downside of Tableau is that you have to have a strong relational database way of thinking to use it effectively. You have to think in terms of aggregations, and occasionally in terms of window functions (Table calculations in Tableau). Tableau was (is?) a much more powerful tool than Power BI (at least this was true in 2019 when I last used PowerBI). Tableau has never been a simple tool by any means. I was a scientist but I used to run Tableau training in my workplace, and I could see how long it took for things to click for most folks. Once you got beyond a few bar charts, things got really complex (partly because you were unlocking a lot of power through relational operations -- in data analysis, there's rarely power without complexity) Relational thinking is a very powerful way to think about (and execute) computation on large-scale data in a performant way -- it is after all the algebra of dataframes -- but I've come to appreciate that it is beyond most people. Even software engineers struggle to think relationally -- many still think in for-loops. Also, things that were seemingly easy to do in Excel -- like doing a row and column cell calculation -- were very difficult. You had to think about the corresponding SQL manipulation and then reproduce it in Tableau.... ... but I think most people just want to plot nice graphs from their Excel data and show it to their bosses. (which they can do with Tableau, but so can they with Power BI) Side note: I have a copy of Tableau 2023 but it seems to have reached a feature plateau -- it is barely different from the Tableau of 2020.
- 3abiton 3y ago
  But there are decent OSS alternatives that can rival it's functionality, so why go with Tableau and it's baggage?
  - wenc 3y ago
    Could you list a few? I tried looking once but nothing came close to Tableau.
latentpot 3y ago
Apache Superset is a good option if you are ok with open source.
oxfordmale 3y ago
I hate Tableau with a passion. The main bugbear is that viewers can't see the SQL code the dashboards execute. I am no fan of Looker, but the "Explore here" allows other users to see the SQL and tweak it if needed. Most intermediate data stakeholders are confident enough to modify the where clause to suit their custom needs, allowing them to self-serve. The licensing costs are prohibitive, too. It is almost unaffordable to share Tableau dashboards with your customers and, instead, have to send them static PDFs of your dashboard. Beyond that, the Tableau infrastructure feels like something from the last century. Data is cached on the server using data extracts rather than following a more modern caching infrastructure.
- KingOfCoders 3y ago
  Looker is obscenely expensive compared to Tableau. Also the UI is bad. The caching of Tableau is a huge money safer and huge performance boost if you e.g. use it with BigQuery (cut our BG costs by 80%). As with every data tool, you need strong data governance, or everyone will define their own metric for revenue and then you have endless discussions about "why the data is wrong" (it isn't). The biggest benefit to me is every marketing person knows Tableau and with a self explaining table structure (e.g. DBT on top of BigQuery) is self serving. The only good thing with Looker is their data journeys, which Tableau doesn't have. The worst (for EU/GDPR at least) feature of Looker is how people can send emails from a query (circumventing corporate email infrastructure, blacklists, data protection etc.). Can you say "Intern sends spam mail to millions of customers because they thought this was a good idea".
  - oxfordmale 3y ago
    I am not recommending Looker either, but data extract stored on the server? That is a last-century solution. We often hit data limits in Tableau online as colleagues get overzealous. Beyond that, it is also a major GDPR headache in Europe. If someone uses their personal account, with elevated access, you suddenly have a data extract on the Tableau Online server that contains personal data, with no way to enforce retention periods.
  - aaronharnly 3y ago
fifilura 3y ago
My limited experience with Tableau is that it felt like Excel on speed. And heavily burdened by legacy (just like Excel or any Microsoft product is by the way). While what we wanted was something that was SQL-native. Back in the days we opted for a tool called Chartio which was later engulfed by Atlassian/Jira. Not sure what happened to it after, but it suited our purpose fine enough. Just line-charts and easily editable SQL. I have some experience with Superset, but it was not really built for customer facing dashboards. Mainly useful for internal use. Blazer as someone else posted sounds interesting. May check it out.
- hughess 3y ago
  You might be interested in Evidence, a SQL-based open source BI tool where all content is version-controllable. Disclaimer: I’m one of the maintainers. A lot of companies use Evidence for customer facing and embedded reporting. https://github.com/evidence-dev/evidence https://github.com/evidence-dev/evidence Previous HN discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35645464 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35645464 (97 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28304781 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28304781 (91 comments)
- Temporary_31337 3y ago
  What’s different between an internal dashboard and a customer facing one? I am mostly asking what specifically is missing from Apache Superset as we are seriously looking into it… for internal use
  - fifilura 3y ago
    I have some recollection about filters defined by jinja macros opening up for SQL injections.
    - fifilura 3y ago
      And this would be fine if you could lock down arbitrary input in e.g. dropdowns, but it was still possible to input arbitrary strings even in a dropdown because of the choice of widget.
Anon_Admirer 3y ago
There seems to be a lot of shade here at Power BI. Forgetting Microsoft’s dominance in the market, I’ve much appreciated Microsoft’s approach to data visualization which is soft on the visuals, but gradually improving them and hard on the programming aspects, such as Power Query or “M” and Data Analysis Expressions (“DAX”). The former they have opened to anyone to create via Power BI visuals SDK. The reason I say this is because something that would take me hours to do in Tableau maybe only take a few minutes with Power BI’s mashup language (Power Query) and the Functional Language DAX. The ability to create temporary tables on the fly and utilize variables and the hundreds of other things you can do with DAX to create complex measures, calculated columns, etc. feels empowering. Most people I’ve spoken to who’ve gone away from Tableau to Power BI and used it long enough start to really appreciate it for the vast capabilities. Additionally, the latest Power BI visual calculations feature released has made the learning curve a lot shorter for those newer to DAX and all our lives much easier. On the visuals side there has been a lot of entrepreneurship to create custom visuals with the SDK to do a lot of visuals that just weren’t available in Tableau. So many that I have a hard time going back to Tableau because its missing a visual I need. Lastly, not many talk about the fact the IT loves it in that its got so many capabilities for providing data governance and security through its various features. Update and one final thought: there is some genius to me in how Microsoft seemed to have created an abstraction that allows the platform to grow independently and greatly on so many fronts - DAX with new functions and features, the Power BI Visuals and their SDK to do more and keep in with user interface changes, and their BI model approach (which now allows GIT versioning with readability changes).
- wokwokwok 3y ago
  Wow, you really love PoweBI huh. I’ve done the microstrategy, powerbi, tableau dance for about 3 years and I wasn’t impressed. It’s easy to do easy things and hard to do hard things. The versioning is quite bad. The powerBI gateways are complex to maintain, expensive and incomprehensible when they don’t work (update failed? Good luck! Out of quota? Times out? Haha…) DAX is pretty; but when it’s big, it’s spaghetti. Worse than SQL. The custom components are frustratingly difficult to get right because they have to be extremely flexible. …but, sure; it is what it is. The ecosystem is pretty good. Lots of documentation on how to do trivial things. It’s ok. I would avoid it if I could though; there’s a deep well of suffering to anyone who has to look after the stuff that people “whip together quickly” in PowerBI. So… I guess it’s fair to say opinions vary. Maybe it’s better than the others? …buuut, like it? Nah.
a1o 3y ago
When I played around with Tableau it felt much more intuitive and easy to use than PowerBI. But I guess since people already had a contract with Microsoft for whatever product, adding PowerBI there was easier than pitching an entirely new contract for this product that ticked similar feature boxes. I am sad because I would very much prefer Tableau could exist for many years as a reasonable competitor otherwise I predict Power BI will just stagnate.
TrackerFF 3y ago
The place I work at uses Tableau, and it is thriving there. If it was up to me though, we'd move to some open source BI tool - but in the end, we're paying for Tableau for three reasons: 1) Premium (24/7) support if needed. 2) In-house tableau consultants. 3) Too many production reports have already been written in Tableau. With that said, I've experienced some frustration with Tableau. Want writeback combability? That'll be thousands (if not tens of thousands) of *dollars per year* in additional license fees. Want some other feature, same deal. With that said, the licenses have grown so much in the past few years that our stakeholders have started asking around for analysts to check out competitors and OS tools.
- liotier 3y ago
  We had exactly the same list of objections to moving from Business Objects. Then, in its infinite wisdom, our holding company signed with Salesforce and we moved to Tableau. Significant work but relational is so mature that swapping the reporting layer is a safe migration for anyone... Good thing because it is probably not the last occurence !
lifestyleguru 3y ago
The best part of these dashboards is when the Big Four consultant creates The Perfect Dashboard, then asks to embed that nested unresponsive iframe mess into a web app. "Why it's so tiny, fonts are unreadable, and it's packed with scrollbars?!"
navaneethpk 3y ago
A customer of ours at ToolJet, specializing in service-based offerings, traditionally used Tableau for their analytics needs. They decided to give us a shot and started moving some of their customers over to ToolJet, taking advantage of our Plotly-based chart component for visualizations. While the initial lift to replicate their Tableau setups in ToolJet is non-trivial, the value proposition is turning out to be significantly more compelling. They're now confidently migrating more customers. They're aware that our platform might hit some snags with the more complex use cases but most of their customers have similar use cases that are less complex.
MPlus88 3y ago
[dead]
monkeydust 3y ago
I was an early Tableau adopter and promoter in my org many years back. At the time the incumbent, Qliksense, was lagging badly and there was genuine grass roots support for Tableau as our next gen BI tool. Adoption grew significantly and people were happy...for a while. I remember reaching out the founder/CEO at the time and getting responses back. It was great. Fast forward today and its different, over time Tableau dissatisfaction grew, I think a lot of it was the fact that our use-cases got more advanced and performance dropped and not being able to understand the complex SQL it was generating didn't help. Also Qliksense got noticeably better UX and importantly was cheaper. Today, MS PowerBI which came from left field, is really the front runner for us. Parking this situation for a second I think the real issue is that people are getting a bit overwhelmed with dashboards. I have access to near 100 across the three platforms, they more or less do the same thing and are thus somewhat commoditized, I don't feel passionate about any of them as I did back in the day with Tableau. Worse, I have to spend mental bandwidth figuring out which one I need to open to answer my query, then I have to spend time navigating the UX to get my answer so I can move on with the task in hand. We don't necessary need more dashboards, just faster ways to go from question to reliable answer where information can be pushed rather than pulled, especially if data points start looking anomalous over time. Note - If your a startup in this field looking to upend the BI space reach out, I have spent a lot of time in this space over the years.
- hughess 3y ago
  I'm one of the founders of Evidence (https://evidence.dev https://evidence.dev) - would be great to hear about your experience. Reaching out now!
- c-linkage 3y ago
  Speaking of too many dashboards, my opinion at this point is that Tableau is where data goes to die. I have so many dashboards that are created in my organization but each dashboard gets one or less views per month. No one ever looks at these dashboards that get created. My feeling is that these dashboards were probably more like one-time reports that someone decided to automate. But there's definitely a sense of Tableau fatigue. And I don't know if switching to a different technology like Power BI will make that any better.
codeulike 3y ago
The five stages of grief Denial: "Tableau will become a tool in the Salesforce toolbox that major players will continue to use." Anger: "Salesforce executives mentioning Tableau less than Slack or Mulesoft on their public calls ... Meanwhile, Microsoft's Power BI is on a hot streak." Bargaining: "I believe it'll be a consistent player at large institutions who typically go through complex project and procurement processes." Depression: "It will no longer be the hot new tool that will be embraced by SMBs. The community will not have the hope and excitement it had in the 2010s." Acceptance: "The magic is no longer there and that's ok. Nothing lasts forever."
- dsaavy 3y ago
  Haha this is spot on.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
jbrooksuk 3y ago
I've never used Tableau, but heard a lot of hate about it. However, in my previous role, we were big fans of Metabase (https://metabase.com https://metabase.com). You can also self-host it, which was a huge win for us.
kozikow 3y ago
I'm currently doing BI evaluation for improvement of the current toolkit, so I might use this comment section for some BI experts' advice. We mostly use Looker Studio + Metabase currently. Investigating Tableau, Looker, PowerBI, Sisense, Omni currently. PowerBI is great, but BigQuery integration seems to be lagging. Is there a way to get such a tool without paying $50K a year? Everything so far is only a "nice to have" upgrade over our mostly free toolkit. We also care about good geospatial visualizations and embedding reports for users without requiring a login.
- rawgabbit 3y ago
  Snowflake purchased Streamlit. When Snowflake has all the kinks worked out, I would create Streamlit applications directly in Snowflake and be done with it. https://docs.snowflake.com/en/developer-guide/streamlit/limitations https://docs.snowflake.com/en/developer-guide/streamlit/limi...
plaidfuji 3y ago
I use tableau for scientific, engineering and operations data visualization and it’s a breath of fresh air compared to my years spent writing pages of MATLAB/matplotlib/seaborn/bokeh/plotly code just to get something presentable. For many use-cases it’s even better and faster than JMP’s graph builder, and that’s saying something. The major missing feature is stats tooling (t-tests and CI-based error bars), but the number of use cases that don’t require these is large and the time saved from Tableau’s “immediately presentable” defaults is huge.
pimlottc 3y ago
SMBs = small-to-medium businesses
probably_satan 3y ago
lost me at basketball analogies
jherskovic 3y ago
I was a big Tableau champion at our org. Lots of dashboards, led a user group, was the go-to expert for a while (think 10 years ago). For us, what killed it was the pricing. They got very greedy very fast. Justifying a 4-digit license, per desktop, was the real killer. We just couldn’t, so the creation of dashboards became a tool of a “priesthood” of sorts. Everyone loved the way the dashboards looked and performed, but people very, very rarely used them. After years trying, I can remember ONE decision that was sorta-adopted based on a dataviz. PowerBI are their lunch because it was “free” with the rest of our Microsoft stuff, so everyone could make the shiny dashboards no one uses instead of just a few. In some cases we just wrote our own d3-based visualizations. It was easier than dealing with the constant licensing headaches Tableau brought.
- lupire 3y ago
  Dumping Monopolist always wins.
- BandButcher 3y ago
  Haha funny hearing the other side of the story to this, i was a front end dev during the tableu peak who helped create several custom dashboards in JavaScript...for multiple different companies! I worked on so many that eventually i came to hate making them lol, data viz can be extremely subjective and you get into weird paradigms of how much data viz you display vs user actions on that snapshot of data (ex. viewing details, exporting to diff formats, printing the dashboard with no cut-offs, manually refreshing stale data vs auto refresh)
- silent_cal 3y ago
  Went down a similar path, but d3 is way too hard. I think we used chart.js?
- j45 3y ago
  PowerBI started small and developed quickly. Microsoft like any software company will raise prices on their tools similar to tableau or oracle in the past. Microsoft uniquely has a large portion of the fortune 100-500 as customers. They have already had that market from office, m365, etc and will grow those things. Microsoft is relatively early in the licensing lifecycle arc for cloud. This will happen relative to the maturity of offering, uptake/demand to pricing. Some of this can already be seen with the Business central pricing. Again, the above is not to single Microsoft out. Only that their products are relatively young but developing extremely quickly and the execution of the pricing models will be relative to a lot of things like demand, and stock prices.
silent_cal 3y ago
I think Tableau is still pretty popular in the consulting world where they use it to prepare slide decks for presentations.

146 points by dsaavy 3y ago

Our renewal got Shanghaied by an extremely greedy and over zealous sales rep who injected himself between us and our renewals reps, and wanted to turn a sub $80k renewal into damn near $200k this year and $300k next. Needless to say it got nowhere fast and, by the time he gave up and threw us “back” to renewals, the damage had been done. We elected to do what they thought was unthinkable and we just walked away. My oh my, it was very, very good day, when I got to tell them to go f themselves.

leetrout 3y ago
This is about to be us with Heroku. Feels like software sales has just gotten worse for years now.
- calciphus 3y ago
  Just Salesforce.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- CSMastermind 3y ago
  Heroku is one of those things that if someone tells me their still on it without a plan to migrate I question the executive leadership at their company. Shade of its former self, expensive, and there are plenty of better options. Really seems like the company is in zombie mode until it's eventual slow demise.
  - plufz 3y ago
    I haven’t used Heroku in a long time but I really liked the feeling of starting up a database and a container for the app with two clicks. Which are the main alternatives in that space today?
    - bantunes 3y ago
      Fly.io maybe?
    - mmaia 3y ago
      The best alternative I found is render.com It has this feeling of "just works", and documentation is pretty good.
    - realusername 3y ago
      I just use Dokku on a VPS and it works fine. Sure it might not scale but Heroku didn't either.
  - PanMan 3y ago
    I agree.. but I'm surprised how little Heroku alternatives have popped up yet.. There is new contestants, mostly focussed on more global deploys, but no "Heroku but maintained" that I know of.. yet.
    - MobileVet 3y ago
      We did a bake off 18 months ago and identified ~5 similar platforms at the time. Fly.io and Render were 2 of them. We chose Render and have been happy with things just chugging along as they were on Heroku. Their runtime seems to take up quite a bit more RAM, but the IAC is a great addition resulting in 100% consistent environments.
    - infecto 3y ago
      I am not surprised. There are a handful of competitors but I believe the ship has sailed. I am a complete AWS dunce but it's too easy for me to spin up an ECS with spot machines and run my python app on it. When Heroku hit the scene and for many years, there was no easy alternative. You had to go and provision your own machines to then setup.
      - DanielHB 3y ago
        Is it just me or ECS is relatively complicated? I mean, it is no k8, but still you need to set up a lot of stuff to get it to work.
        dkersten 3y ago
        I actually gave up on AWS forever when trying to use ECS. It was incredibly complex and it kept failing to deploy, but cloudeatch only contained log entries for it about 20% of the time. All I could do was click redeploy over and over — sometimes there were logs, usually not. And they charged me for every single deploy. After a day and a $100 bill later, I gave up and used DigitalOcean’s hosted docker instead. I had it up she’d rubbing in under ten minutes and no bill other than the actual usage costs. Now I avoid AWS as much as I can. Of course my employers tend to be on AWS so sadly I can’t completely avoid it, but I do my best and would never recommend it anymore.
  - te_chris 3y ago
    I'm working with a company who are very happy on it currently. It still works really well for them, they're ok with the cost relative to the rest of their costs.
  - swat535 3y ago
    What better alternatives are there? I saw Fly.io and it doesn't even offer a managed database, not to mention the fact that they have had serious reliability issues. Heroku is pretty battle tested and mature at this point, though the feature development has stopped, I don't doubt Salesforce is now going to use it simply as a the "cloud" offering for their other products..
- MobileVet 3y ago
  I would encourage you to find the exit ASAP from Heroku… we saw continual degradation of service and uptime during our last 2 years there.
CobrastanJorji 3y ago
One can safely assume Salesforce has very well made internal Tableau visualizations of Salepserson performance. That sort of failure would almost certainly show up with crisp drop shadows. It is a shame, however, that the behavior of the sales rep probably made the renewals rep's chart look bad if not worse.
- rndmswethrwawy 3y ago
  They could have, but I can promise you that if they have Tableau visualizations _at all_ at this point, they're shit. Letting something "die on the vine" is the only way to describe Salesforce's Tableau acquisition.
- blitzar 3y ago
  > the behavior of the sales rep probably made the sales rep chart for "outreach activity" tick up and the renewals rep's chart was fired because they didnt hit their target
- toyg 3y ago
  > One can safely assume Salesforce has very well made internal Tableau visualizations of Salesperson performance. I can't decide whether this statement is ironic or not. Salesforce is just another big company, with committees and meetings and crisp charts that exist only to show numbers going up, not to actually identify anything as boring as actual operational performance.
- justin66 3y ago
  > It is a shame, however, that the behavior of the sales rep probably made the renewals rep's chart look bad if not worse. Is the fate of commissioned salespeople to be eaten by other commissioned salespeople.
- jncfhnb 3y ago
  Sales teams often punish reps for many things out of their control. It’s pretty dumb.
stuckkeys 3y ago
Just out curiosity, what did you end up replacing it with? Looking to shop for a client. They were hyped on Tableau.
- topicseed 3y ago
  Superset works wonders
- marcinzm 3y ago
  Depending on the use cases PowerBI and Looker.
- prometheus76 3y ago
  We're a Power BI house with eight companies in a holding company. Power BI also has a high-security option, which is essential for us for security compliance requirements on our government contracts. We also have a blanket license so everyone can see the dashboards, and we're about to upgrade to Premium company-wide. It took some time for me to switch from Excel paradigm to Power BI paradigm, but once it clicked, I've never looked back.
mathattack 3y ago
The Salesforce reps just couldn’t help themselves. Too much Oracle in their DNA. Ruined the customer relationship, and encouraged the move to Microsoft and their “free” alternative.
scrapcode 3y ago
I'm in the enterprise procurement world and it's mind-boggling to me how many software companies in the past two years have forced themselves to $0 revenue from us by trying to double (or more!) their already exorbitant prices.
- anon84873628 3y ago
  Is this greed, or a struggle for them to survive?
  - cutemonster 3y ago
    It's sometimes a good move and I've seen it recommended here at HN pretty often I think. look: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16477003 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16477003 "I've now 4X'd my pricing (from 3 figures to 4 figures a month!) and the customers got 10X better, complain less, I work less and earn more"
  - scrapcode 3y ago
    With certain requirements from large corporations switching from usage or license-based pricing to models such as charging per employee in the overall organization, it's hard to imagine it doesn't involve a little greed. It makes the choice even easier when clear alternatives are much more economical. Imagine for example you're a small shop with your own budget in an org the size of Alphabet with a couple of Java servers that you purchase support to the tune of $5k/year and then they all of a sudden want to charge $1,000,000/month because there are ~200k employees within your larger organization. It gets even more convoluted when you get into hardware support, where the support itself outside of warranty can be more expensive annually than replacing the hardware and getting N years of support with warranty.

Slackwise 3y ago

> Is Tableau dead? Yes, Salesforce consumes companies whole. Just like they did with Heroku and others.

kevsim 3y ago
Slack seems to be surviving thus far at least
- barryrandall 3y ago
  They don't have any credible competition.

pinewurst 3y ago

I’m not sure this is totally on Salesforce as the Tableau product has gotten so sluggish and inflexible. At my last job I started dumping data from Tableau to CSV (don’t get me started on the crap CSVs that Tableau generates) and importing to R for analysis. Good riddance.

Dyac 3y ago
We have Tableau but I've never found it particularly useful, as most of what I do is very exploratory and Tableau seems more like a place to build final presentation of things that will just go to gather dust. I now use both of these tools below (no affiliation), which you might find interesting. [1] www.exploratory.io [2] www.count.co
nomilk 3y ago
I don't use Tableau but had similar feelings recently with Databricks. Tools like these are probably fine for folks who want more grunt than a laptop without needing to learn much about cloud, infrastructure or security. But for me, it feels like a straight jacket. It lets you get going quickly but at the expense of flexibility. Slowly but surely the warts become apparent. A year or two really isn't a lot of time (for an individual nor company) to invest in order to build long term skills in powerful tools that side step inflexible (and expensive) platforms.
Rastonbury 3y ago
Looking what they did to Heroku and are doing to Tableau, I'm not optimistic for Slack

kimi 3y ago

I don't know jack about Tableau, but if the alternative is Power BI, I got a feeling they may be safe. My current company sells telephony and call-center analytics for MS Teams using our software, and during pre-sales meeting, one of the staple questions is "So we can avoid Power BI entirely?" followed by a minor thanksgiving ceremony and presentation of credit card. I get a feeling it's not too dear to the hearts of its users.

ako 3y ago
Why do they want to avoid PowerBI?
- antoine_b0ss 3y ago
  [dead]
- kimi 3y ago
  I'm not sure, I just see it happen. To put things in context, our small claim to fame is anyway getting some aggregate data about lost calls and attempts that is not possible to produce in Power BI directly[1]. So it's likely that they would buy or not buy it even if it was based on Power BI itself. [1] https://www.queuemetrics.com/teams.jsp https://www.queuemetrics.com/teams.jsp
- prometheus76 3y ago
  I'm going to hazard a guess based on my experience of being the one who brought it to my current employer after learning it at a previous employer: it's really hard to understand for awhile, especially coming from Excel. The paradigm required to build anything more than SUM or AVERAGE can be very unintuitive and feels almost like black magic. It takes a lot of trial and error and patience to finally grasp how Power BI handles calculations if you are used to the freedom of Excel. That being said, once it clicks, it feels like you are a magician, and you can do really advanced analytics on giant tables, which is great. We pull a bunch of data out of the guts of MS Project 2010 and do a lot of custom analysis on it. It took about two years to go from scratch to a set of reports that served everyone's needs that also required minimal maintenance. Then we got purchased by a larger company, so now the work is in rolling out a similar set of reports for the sister companies, as well as rolling them up into corporate-wide reports. It's a lot of fun.

thejosh 3y ago

Considering that when I asked about basic features, and bring told that the people interested/working on those left once Salesforce came in... Yeah.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

wenc 3y ago

I've been using Tableau since 2013 to deploy dashboards, which in my case are front ends to ML model output. (for me, I used it as a Streamlit before Streamlit existed) People think of Tableau as a dashboard tool, which it is. But it's also a great tool for doing EDA (exploratory data analysis) on multidimensional data. Instead of writing lots of seaborn/ggplot code (and having to remember the syntax), you can just move things around in Tableau in a fraction of the time. The downside of Tableau is that you have to have a strong relational database way of thinking to use it effectively. You have to think in terms of aggregations, and occasionally in terms of window functions (Table calculations in Tableau). Tableau was (is?) a much more powerful tool than Power BI (at least this was true in 2019 when I last used PowerBI). Tableau has never been a simple tool by any means. I was a scientist but I used to run Tableau training in my workplace, and I could see how long it took for things to click for most folks. Once you got beyond a few bar charts, things got really complex (partly because you were unlocking a lot of power through relational operations -- in data analysis, there's rarely power without complexity) Relational thinking is a very powerful way to think about (and execute) computation on large-scale data in a performant way -- it is after all the algebra of dataframes -- but I've come to appreciate that it is beyond most people. Even software engineers struggle to think relationally -- many still think in for-loops. Also, things that were seemingly easy to do in Excel -- like doing a row and column cell calculation -- were very difficult. You had to think about the corresponding SQL manipulation and then reproduce it in Tableau.... ... but I think most people just want to plot nice graphs from their Excel data and show it to their bosses. (which they can do with Tableau, but so can they with Power BI) Side note: I have a copy of Tableau 2023 but it seems to have reached a feature plateau -- it is barely different from the Tableau of 2020.

3abiton 3y ago
But there are decent OSS alternatives that can rival it's functionality, so why go with Tableau and it's baggage?
- wenc 3y ago
  Could you list a few? I tried looking once but nothing came close to Tableau.

latentpot 3y ago

Apache Superset is a good option if you are ok with open source.

oxfordmale 3y ago

I hate Tableau with a passion. The main bugbear is that viewers can't see the SQL code the dashboards execute. I am no fan of Looker, but the "Explore here" allows other users to see the SQL and tweak it if needed. Most intermediate data stakeholders are confident enough to modify the where clause to suit their custom needs, allowing them to self-serve. The licensing costs are prohibitive, too. It is almost unaffordable to share Tableau dashboards with your customers and, instead, have to send them static PDFs of your dashboard. Beyond that, the Tableau infrastructure feels like something from the last century. Data is cached on the server using data extracts rather than following a more modern caching infrastructure.

KingOfCoders 3y ago
Looker is obscenely expensive compared to Tableau. Also the UI is bad. The caching of Tableau is a huge money safer and huge performance boost if you e.g. use it with BigQuery (cut our BG costs by 80%). As with every data tool, you need strong data governance, or everyone will define their own metric for revenue and then you have endless discussions about "why the data is wrong" (it isn't). The biggest benefit to me is every marketing person knows Tableau and with a self explaining table structure (e.g. DBT on top of BigQuery) is self serving. The only good thing with Looker is their data journeys, which Tableau doesn't have. The worst (for EU/GDPR at least) feature of Looker is how people can send emails from a query (circumventing corporate email infrastructure, blacklists, data protection etc.). Can you say "Intern sends spam mail to millions of customers because they thought this was a good idea".
- oxfordmale 3y ago
  I am not recommending Looker either, but data extract stored on the server? That is a last-century solution. We often hit data limits in Tableau online as colleagues get overzealous. Beyond that, it is also a major GDPR headache in Europe. If someone uses their personal account, with elevated access, you suddenly have a data extract on the Tableau Online server that contains personal data, with no way to enforce retention periods.
- aaronharnly 3y ago

fifilura 3y ago

My limited experience with Tableau is that it felt like Excel on speed. And heavily burdened by legacy (just like Excel or any Microsoft product is by the way). While what we wanted was something that was SQL-native. Back in the days we opted for a tool called Chartio which was later engulfed by Atlassian/Jira. Not sure what happened to it after, but it suited our purpose fine enough. Just line-charts and easily editable SQL. I have some experience with Superset, but it was not really built for customer facing dashboards. Mainly useful for internal use. Blazer as someone else posted sounds interesting. May check it out.

hughess 3y ago
You might be interested in Evidence, a SQL-based open source BI tool where all content is version-controllable. Disclaimer: I’m one of the maintainers. A lot of companies use Evidence for customer facing and embedded reporting. https://github.com/evidence-dev/evidence https://github.com/evidence-dev/evidence Previous HN discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35645464 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35645464 (97 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28304781 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28304781 (91 comments)
Temporary_31337 3y ago
What’s different between an internal dashboard and a customer facing one? I am mostly asking what specifically is missing from Apache Superset as we are seriously looking into it… for internal use
- fifilura 3y ago
  I have some recollection about filters defined by jinja macros opening up for SQL injections.
  - fifilura 3y ago
    And this would be fine if you could lock down arbitrary input in e.g. dropdowns, but it was still possible to input arbitrary strings even in a dropdown because of the choice of widget.

Anon_Admirer 3y ago

There seems to be a lot of shade here at Power BI. Forgetting Microsoft’s dominance in the market, I’ve much appreciated Microsoft’s approach to data visualization which is soft on the visuals, but gradually improving them and hard on the programming aspects, such as Power Query or “M” and Data Analysis Expressions (“DAX”). The former they have opened to anyone to create via Power BI visuals SDK. The reason I say this is because something that would take me hours to do in Tableau maybe only take a few minutes with Power BI’s mashup language (Power Query) and the Functional Language DAX. The ability to create temporary tables on the fly and utilize variables and the hundreds of other things you can do with DAX to create complex measures, calculated columns, etc. feels empowering. Most people I’ve spoken to who’ve gone away from Tableau to Power BI and used it long enough start to really appreciate it for the vast capabilities. Additionally, the latest Power BI visual calculations feature released has made the learning curve a lot shorter for those newer to DAX and all our lives much easier. On the visuals side there has been a lot of entrepreneurship to create custom visuals with the SDK to do a lot of visuals that just weren’t available in Tableau. So many that I have a hard time going back to Tableau because its missing a visual I need. Lastly, not many talk about the fact the IT loves it in that its got so many capabilities for providing data governance and security through its various features. Update and one final thought: there is some genius to me in how Microsoft seemed to have created an abstraction that allows the platform to grow independently and greatly on so many fronts - DAX with new functions and features, the Power BI Visuals and their SDK to do more and keep in with user interface changes, and their BI model approach (which now allows GIT versioning with readability changes).

wokwokwok 3y ago
Wow, you really love PoweBI huh. I’ve done the microstrategy, powerbi, tableau dance for about 3 years and I wasn’t impressed. It’s easy to do easy things and hard to do hard things. The versioning is quite bad. The powerBI gateways are complex to maintain, expensive and incomprehensible when they don’t work (update failed? Good luck! Out of quota? Times out? Haha…) DAX is pretty; but when it’s big, it’s spaghetti. Worse than SQL. The custom components are frustratingly difficult to get right because they have to be extremely flexible. …but, sure; it is what it is. The ecosystem is pretty good. Lots of documentation on how to do trivial things. It’s ok. I would avoid it if I could though; there’s a deep well of suffering to anyone who has to look after the stuff that people “whip together quickly” in PowerBI. So… I guess it’s fair to say opinions vary. Maybe it’s better than the others? …buuut, like it? Nah.

a1o 3y ago

When I played around with Tableau it felt much more intuitive and easy to use than PowerBI. But I guess since people already had a contract with Microsoft for whatever product, adding PowerBI there was easier than pitching an entirely new contract for this product that ticked similar feature boxes. I am sad because I would very much prefer Tableau could exist for many years as a reasonable competitor otherwise I predict Power BI will just stagnate.

TrackerFF 3y ago

The place I work at uses Tableau, and it is thriving there. If it was up to me though, we'd move to some open source BI tool - but in the end, we're paying for Tableau for three reasons: 1) Premium (24/7) support if needed. 2) In-house tableau consultants. 3) Too many production reports have already been written in Tableau. With that said, I've experienced some frustration with Tableau. Want writeback combability? That'll be thousands (if not tens of thousands) of *dollars per year* in additional license fees. Want some other feature, same deal. With that said, the licenses have grown so much in the past few years that our stakeholders have started asking around for analysts to check out competitors and OS tools.

liotier 3y ago
We had exactly the same list of objections to moving from Business Objects. Then, in its infinite wisdom, our holding company signed with Salesforce and we moved to Tableau. Significant work but relational is so mature that swapping the reporting layer is a safe migration for anyone... Good thing because it is probably not the last occurence !

lifestyleguru 3y ago

The best part of these dashboards is when the Big Four consultant creates The Perfect Dashboard, then asks to embed that nested unresponsive iframe mess into a web app. "Why it's so tiny, fonts are unreadable, and it's packed with scrollbars?!"

navaneethpk 3y ago

A customer of ours at ToolJet, specializing in service-based offerings, traditionally used Tableau for their analytics needs. They decided to give us a shot and started moving some of their customers over to ToolJet, taking advantage of our Plotly-based chart component for visualizations. While the initial lift to replicate their Tableau setups in ToolJet is non-trivial, the value proposition is turning out to be significantly more compelling. They're now confidently migrating more customers. They're aware that our platform might hit some snags with the more complex use cases but most of their customers have similar use cases that are less complex.

MPlus88 3y ago

[dead]

monkeydust 3y ago

I was an early Tableau adopter and promoter in my org many years back. At the time the incumbent, Qliksense, was lagging badly and there was genuine grass roots support for Tableau as our next gen BI tool. Adoption grew significantly and people were happy...for a while. I remember reaching out the founder/CEO at the time and getting responses back. It was great. Fast forward today and its different, over time Tableau dissatisfaction grew, I think a lot of it was the fact that our use-cases got more advanced and performance dropped and not being able to understand the complex SQL it was generating didn't help. Also Qliksense got noticeably better UX and importantly was cheaper. Today, MS PowerBI which came from left field, is really the front runner for us. Parking this situation for a second I think the real issue is that people are getting a bit overwhelmed with dashboards. I have access to near 100 across the three platforms, they more or less do the same thing and are thus somewhat commoditized, I don't feel passionate about any of them as I did back in the day with Tableau. Worse, I have to spend mental bandwidth figuring out which one I need to open to answer my query, then I have to spend time navigating the UX to get my answer so I can move on with the task in hand. We don't necessary need more dashboards, just faster ways to go from question to reliable answer where information can be pushed rather than pulled, especially if data points start looking anomalous over time. Note - If your a startup in this field looking to upend the BI space reach out, I have spent a lot of time in this space over the years.

hughess 3y ago
I'm one of the founders of Evidence (https://evidence.dev https://evidence.dev) - would be great to hear about your experience. Reaching out now!
c-linkage 3y ago
Speaking of too many dashboards, my opinion at this point is that Tableau is where data goes to die. I have so many dashboards that are created in my organization but each dashboard gets one or less views per month. No one ever looks at these dashboards that get created. My feeling is that these dashboards were probably more like one-time reports that someone decided to automate. But there's definitely a sense of Tableau fatigue. And I don't know if switching to a different technology like Power BI will make that any better.

codeulike 3y ago

The five stages of grief Denial: "Tableau will become a tool in the Salesforce toolbox that major players will continue to use." Anger: "Salesforce executives mentioning Tableau less than Slack or Mulesoft on their public calls ... Meanwhile, Microsoft's Power BI is on a hot streak." Bargaining: "I believe it'll be a consistent player at large institutions who typically go through complex project and procurement processes." Depression: "It will no longer be the hot new tool that will be embraced by SMBs. The community will not have the hope and excitement it had in the 2010s." Acceptance: "The magic is no longer there and that's ok. Nothing lasts forever."

dsaavy 3y ago
Haha this is spot on.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

jbrooksuk 3y ago

I've never used Tableau, but heard a lot of hate about it. However, in my previous role, we were big fans of Metabase (https://metabase.com https://metabase.com). You can also self-host it, which was a huge win for us.

kozikow 3y ago

I'm currently doing BI evaluation for improvement of the current toolkit, so I might use this comment section for some BI experts' advice. We mostly use Looker Studio + Metabase currently. Investigating Tableau, Looker, PowerBI, Sisense, Omni currently. PowerBI is great, but BigQuery integration seems to be lagging. Is there a way to get such a tool without paying $50K a year? Everything so far is only a "nice to have" upgrade over our mostly free toolkit. We also care about good geospatial visualizations and embedding reports for users without requiring a login.

rawgabbit 3y ago
Snowflake purchased Streamlit. When Snowflake has all the kinks worked out, I would create Streamlit applications directly in Snowflake and be done with it. https://docs.snowflake.com/en/developer-guide/streamlit/limitations https://docs.snowflake.com/en/developer-guide/streamlit/limi...

plaidfuji 3y ago

I use tableau for scientific, engineering and operations data visualization and it’s a breath of fresh air compared to my years spent writing pages of MATLAB/matplotlib/seaborn/bokeh/plotly code just to get something presentable. For many use-cases it’s even better and faster than JMP’s graph builder, and that’s saying something. The major missing feature is stats tooling (t-tests and CI-based error bars), but the number of use cases that don’t require these is large and the time saved from Tableau’s “immediately presentable” defaults is huge.

pimlottc 3y ago

SMBs = small-to-medium businesses

probably_satan 3y ago

lost me at basketball analogies

jherskovic 3y ago

I was a big Tableau champion at our org. Lots of dashboards, led a user group, was the go-to expert for a while (think 10 years ago). For us, what killed it was the pricing. They got very greedy very fast. Justifying a 4-digit license, per desktop, was the real killer. We just couldn’t, so the creation of dashboards became a tool of a “priesthood” of sorts. Everyone loved the way the dashboards looked and performed, but people very, very rarely used them. After years trying, I can remember ONE decision that was sorta-adopted based on a dataviz. PowerBI are their lunch because it was “free” with the rest of our Microsoft stuff, so everyone could make the shiny dashboards no one uses instead of just a few. In some cases we just wrote our own d3-based visualizations. It was easier than dealing with the constant licensing headaches Tableau brought.

lupire 3y ago
Dumping Monopolist always wins.
BandButcher 3y ago
Haha funny hearing the other side of the story to this, i was a front end dev during the tableu peak who helped create several custom dashboards in JavaScript...for multiple different companies! I worked on so many that eventually i came to hate making them lol, data viz can be extremely subjective and you get into weird paradigms of how much data viz you display vs user actions on that snapshot of data (ex. viewing details, exporting to diff formats, printing the dashboard with no cut-offs, manually refreshing stale data vs auto refresh)
silent_cal 3y ago
Went down a similar path, but d3 is way too hard. I think we used chart.js?
j45 3y ago
PowerBI started small and developed quickly. Microsoft like any software company will raise prices on their tools similar to tableau or oracle in the past. Microsoft uniquely has a large portion of the fortune 100-500 as customers. They have already had that market from office, m365, etc and will grow those things. Microsoft is relatively early in the licensing lifecycle arc for cloud. This will happen relative to the maturity of offering, uptake/demand to pricing. Some of this can already be seen with the Business central pricing. Again, the above is not to single Microsoft out. Only that their products are relatively young but developing extremely quickly and the execution of the pricing models will be relative to a lot of things like demand, and stock prices.

silent_cal 3y ago

I think Tableau is still pretty popular in the consulting world where they use it to prepare slide decks for presentations.