Is Tableau The Next Google? 264
Roland Piquepaille writes "At least, the founders of Tableau Software, a small company established in 2003 and based in Seattle, come from Stanford University, where they worked down the hall with Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin back in 1997. In 'Tableau making name for itself,' the Seattle Post-Intelligencer writes that Tableau intends to make structured databases easy to use the way Google did with unstructured data. So the company is turning databases into easy-to-generate graphics. Tableau doesn't say who are its customers, but claims that it has more than 100 installations and that it's already profitable. This graphical data mining tool runs on desktops and costs $1,000 per user for a standard edition and $1,600 per user for a professional version. Will this company be successful and become another Google? Read more and decide after looking at an example of database drilling."
Killer app? (Score:5, Insightful)
Certainly not something that can be used by hundreds of millions of internet users.
Re:Killer app? (Score:5, Informative)
Let me just give you the one feature which I think makes this extremely useful:
Don't get me wrong. I'm a CLI type of guy, but the truth is that we live in a graphical world, and I get paid to provide users what they need to make their jobs easier.. I'm pretty sure this will help them.
---
There are no data that cannot be plotted on a straight line if the axis are chosen correctly.
Re:Killer app? (Score:5, Interesting)
> and paste it into a spreadsheet and having it
> show up as real data, not graphics.
BFD! That is a trivial coding problem. This sounds like just another semi-pretty OLAP program. In fact, I have seen many, many infinitely more sophisticated graphical data mining tools that actually try to pull out the complex correlations in one or more dimensions rather than just colorizing some otherwise standard graphs.
Yes, I looked at their examples -- not much more than some simple charts -- could easily be included in the next version of Excel without making a dent in the already bloated size of the program.
That being said, for large companies, even a small increase in usability and insight can be worth paying $1000 for a couple of seats. Maybe also for some large research labs. But we are talking at most several thousand customers buying a handful of licenses yielding one time revenues (plus maybe some upgrades) of a couple of million dollars. A far, far cry from Googles ubiquity.
The only thing that they and Google founders have in common is that they got their PhD's at Stamford (along with thousands of others each year)
How the heck did a lame-ass article like this ever make it to the
Re:Killer app? (Score:2, Interesting)
You know, I was going to use the same acronym. I realize it's a bit difficult to get a better understanding of what problem they are trying to solve (that hasn't been tackled a thousand times before on an ad hoc basis by every programmer doing enterprise software) from a non-technical newspaper article and a marketing web-page. However, the biggest problem I have with the web page is not that they are trying to solve doesn't need solving, but that the example screen shots are so contrived with nice
Re:Killer app? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Killer app? (Score:4, Insightful)
Not a real killer app - we've had data mining / visualization / slice 'n' dice packages for over twenty years now. Sadly, none of them ever expand beyond a niche market because:
1) Most users can't interpret 2-D data (other than simple time series and quartile-type histograms.) Many people can't even interpret 2-D data (ask a person to explain a graph of unemployment claims data and you will be unpleasantly surprised.)
2) Most firms that examine complex, high-dimensional data (e.g. insurance companies, wall-street banks, economic think-tanks,) already have seriously sophisticated, domain-tailored tools. Wow, end-of-summer sales of pencils are up in sales district X - I wonder why? You don't think Staples already has some tools for correlation for back-to-school student buying with store-sales figures? Executives will greet this tool with a big yawn.
Free alternatives... (Score:2, Interesting)
Excel 2005, right? (Score:3, Interesting)
The screenshots are really early betas for Excel 2005, right?
I've been using Excel for the last decade or so as my numeric scratchpad when I am manipulating small sets. (Those are sets with less than 2^16 records, Excel's stupidly arbitrary 2-byte length limit per worksheet.)
For years, I have been grumbling that the data manipulation features in Excel are just not strong enough.
I've considered writing a graphical tool that shakes Exc
Incoherence (Score:5, Insightful)
Unstructured data? What are you talking about? Data is by definition structured! This tool just looks like yet another OLAP tool, which have been around for awhile now.
How does this compare to google in any way other than that they are both companies that use computers? Total incoherence.
Re:Incoherence (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Incoherence (Score:3, Funny)
Where's the structure in that, huh?
I bet it's a part of Pi
Yikes! (Score:2)
Where's the structure in that, huh? But drag it into *Tableau*, and I'll betcha it gives you a pretty picture!
It sure does, and I wish you'd told us it was NSFW before posting it....
Re:Incoherence (Score:2, Insightful)
01010 = 10
01000 = 8
01101 = 13
00100 = 4
Seriously, though, what is the general name for a string of symbols if it isn't data? Is "random data" an oxymoron?
Reading a few other threads close to this one, the answer seems to be an undistinct "yes! no! yes! no!...", so I guess it's a matter of opinion.
I sometimes use the word in ways similar to "copy the data from my hard disk" or "generate pseudorandom data" or "data transfer rat
Re:Incoherence (Score:4, Insightful)
data [reference.com] (used with a sing. or pl. verb)
Factual information, especially information organized for analysis or used to reason or make decisions.
Computer Science. Numerical or other information represented in a form suitable for processing by computer.
Values derived from scientific experiments.
Plural of datum.
Um... No it's not.
Re:Incoherence (Score:2)
Boy, you really want to flaunt that you are completely unfamiliar with common terms in use by the data mining industry. You need to read this post [slashdot.org] and then give thanks that you posted anonymously. The moderators should be modding down your comments as uninformed, not modding them up.
Re:Incoherence (Score:3, Informative)
In the database world, on the other hand, it essentially means that the structure is something other than the record/field structure used by databases.
Data mining is sort of in between, and "unstructured" there just means that the particular analysis tools you'r
Re:Incoherence (Score:5, Informative)
This is a common term in the database, search and information retrieval fields. Broadly, "Structured data" refers to information that is split up into well-defined component fields; "unstructured data" is data in one undifferentiated field.
As usual this is context-specific and not truly a binary distinction, but consider an HTML web page that has been generated from a database. In the database the information is highly structured: stored as fields that have both syntactic and semantic rules associated with them. On the web page you have essentially a block of text, usually with minimal structure to it. Both contain the same information but one has lots of structure, the other has much less.
SQL is a good language for querying structured data, Google is a good "language" for querying unstructured data.
Re:Incoherence (Score:3, Informative)
Does 'common usage' trump the 'actual' definition here [reference.com] (e.g. structured vs. unstructured)?
I wish it didn't. Personally, as one in the DBMS field, I would much rather prefer people not use unstructured incorrectly (as 'common usage' does): technically "unstructured data" i
Re:Incoherence (Score:3, Insightful)
Does 'common usage' trump the 'actual' definition here (e.g. structured vs. unstructured)?
I wish it didn't. Personally, as one in the DBMS field, I would much rather prefer people not use unstructured incorrectly (as 'common usage' does): technically "unstructured data"
Re:Incoherence (Score:2)
Does 'common usage' trump the 'actual' definition here [reference.com] (e.g. structured vs. unstructured)?
I wish it didn't. Personally, as one in the DBMS field, I would much rather prefer people not use unstructured incorrectly (as 'common usage' does): technically "unstructured data" i
Re:Incoherence (Score:2)
The real solution is to simply not generate 'not formally defined' data in the first place - if you have your data stored in a DBMS then ship that to the client which can then logically process it (since you provided the definition as well). This is what Codd
Re:Incoherence (Score:2)
"Structured" data (a term typically use
I doubt it... (Score:5, Insightful)
Unless I'm missing something...
Re:I doubt it... (Score:5, Insightful)
AFAIK, Google only cleaned up the look of web searching and started inserting search-specific ads into results pages. Not rocket science, just a good idea. It turned out that they had the right recipie, and they're on top for the foreseeable future.
But, then, maybe I'm just a curmudgeon...
Google also.... (Score:5, Informative)
The idea being that the more linked to a page is, the more value it has - thereby using people as a way of meauring the worth of a page. By examing the words people link with, as well as allowing Googlebombing, it sidesteps meta-tag pollution etc.
Been de-emphasised, compared to other sub-algorithms, but it's not just the appearence that set google apart in the early days. Before they had ad's.
"Early days" *shiver* I can remeber when AltaVista was the pinnicle of web searching, and using Archie and Veronica.
nope (Score:3, Interesting)
Its simple yes, but not as trivial as you seem to suggest.
The key to Google is relevance (Score:3, Interesting)
Now possibly others might have figured that out eventually. But what you really have to give Google credit for is maintaining performance and relevance. Everyone on earth switching to using your search engine? Seemingly never a problem for Google where I am not sure I've ever seen a perceptible slowdown in search results (think it may have happened once or twice). Also, gene
Re:I doubt it... (Score:3, Interesting)
I, personally, can think of a c
Re:I doubt it... (Score:2)
I will be the next Google (Score:2, Funny)
The connections and similarities are endless. Watch out Google!
Re:I doubt it... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I doubt it... (Score:2)
Google has become successful by following the rules of good business behaviour. These are:
- offer a product that people want/need
- do it well
- always look to improve and innovate
The good guys win in the face of a jaded public perception of a faceless, uncaring business existence. There can be no better goodwill than that. I am hoping that Google will actually change the world. It probably will.
Great for our company (Score:2)
warning
Re:Great for our company (Score:2)
If this tool can allow someone with limited technical ability to mine our data for marketing information we could save a lot of money with it.
Here's the crux of this problem. You want someone will little technical ability to mine data? Mining data is a technical problem. It's not just about the tool.
just like before the crash (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:just like before the crash (Score:5, Interesting)
This leads to a legitimate, if somewhat controversial question: Why are "Bloggers" classified as "Journalists"? What makes Roland into such an expert on anything? Well, he has a blog about technology, he MUST be an expert! He's skill set? Well, his resume [primidi.com] is NOT extraordinary. (Well, it is filled with phrases like "Animation of international groups", whatever the fuck that means). So, why is this guy given any credence? As another poster said earlier, this is SPAM!
Re:just like before the crash (Score:2)
another advertorial... (Score:2, Insightful)
The "Next Google?" (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's see:
One has a kick ass interface and is free.
One runs on windows and cost over 1K per user
One is geek friendly and intelligent.
One is utterly, utterly unknown.
One has "Do No Evil" all over their offices
One astroturfs Slashdot for a news story
Dunno guys. I think it's a wash.
Re:The "Next Google?" (Score:2)
and now *insightful* reply to parent -> display??
Geeze mods this is funny as hell!!
-nB
Re:The "Next Google?" (Score:2)
Step 2. Consider this (from the article):
Will this company be successful and become another Google? First, graphical data mining has never been a big hit. And second, there are lots of competitors in the business intelligence sector, including at least Business Objects, Cognos, Hyperion and MicroStrategy. So make your bets and wait for the next multibillion-dollar IPO.
Step 3. Conclude: Nothing to see here, move along.
BTM
buzzwords! (Score:2, Insightful)
Maybe it's just my age, but every great product I've seen has not been hyped like this. It just discredits Google in my opinion, even though it's not really their fault.
Not another google. (Score:5, Insightful)
Can you pay to get your story on Slashdot these days? This seems more like advertising. It certainly isn't interesting news.
Re:Not another google. (Score:2)
yeah, we knew what you meant. i'm just being nitpicky.
Another one... (Score:3, Insightful)
How much for a front page posting? Seems like many stories these days are just ads.
Re:Another one... (Score:2, Insightful)
I think slash and the majority of other places are suffering from news shortages. Not much SCO stuff going around, MS has been done to death, and all people seem to be coming out with are press releases.
If you've got an interesting story for us all, by all means submit it.
Please dont sit around bitching about it, we are meant to have the Open Source ethos.
The quality of the front page is related to the quality of the submissions - shit in, shit out.
We all need to go hunt down some gems of stori
Smells like 1999... (Score:3, Insightful)
If you were to have predicted in 1997 that ANY ONE company would be worth billions, you'd be smart, but to have predicted that COMPANY X would be worth billions, you'd be genius...
Close, but no cigar (Score:3, Insightful)
Generally... (Score:5, Interesting)
Will Tableau be the next Google? No, but it will be Tableau, and may even be a great service. Whether or not it will succeed, and why, remains to be determined.
(In my opinion, the difficulty of spelling a name with three vowels next to each other will be strike one against Tableau... if people can't remember how to spell it, they won't be able to find it the first/second/third/etc. time.)
~UP
Re: Specifically... (Score:4, Insightful)
Unfortunately, it looks like they succeeded in their first round of 'turfing because they even got me to talk about them; however, they won't get me to say their name (I won't let them enter my consciousness just yet, even if they've planted seeds for my subconscious).
Re: Specifically... (Score:2)
I know Google prides itself on not dirtily manipulating its search results, but I think they should make an exception in this case. I would like to see a search for this astroturfing corporate website (that is, www.tableausoftware.com) return these results:
Re:Generally... (Score:2)
Re:Are you the next X? (Score:2)
The marketers behind Tableau would probably market their product and not their affiliation with Google, if the product was any damn good.
Spinning their mediocre product this way makes me want to look away with pity and disgust, the same way I do when I see the remains of a squirrel that had been squished by a car's tire.
Is slashdot the new livejournal? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Is slashdot the new livejournal? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Is slashdot the new livejournal? (Score:5, Interesting)
Unstructured Data (Score:2)
I'll believe that... (Score:2)
Blog spam (Score:5, Informative)
I'm not going to go as far as a lot of people who post about this and claim that this makes him an inherently evil force that must be stopped, it doesn't, but I'd just like people to be aware of this. I mean, his blog entry on the topic is usually just a rehashing of the articles submitted adding nothing. I really think the editors should edit out the compulsive blog link, but whatever, there's a lot of things we all think the editors should do that they don't.
Re:Blog spam (Score:5, Interesting)
I know, I know. Submit a patch.
Re:Blog spam (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Blog spam (Score:5, Interesting)
I've noticed this (Score:2)
If he posted more to his blog, I'd add it to the daily read. As it is, I can visit /. and save myself the effort.
Re:Blog spam (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Blog spam (Score:2)
Where's the RSS? (Score:3, Insightful)
Easy answer (Score:2)
Honestly, I don't even see how somebody could think that it ever could be. Sounds like marketing got carried away (and it worked, I guess, we're discussing them, aren't we?).
now we need to filter on submitters too (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:now we need to filter on submitters too (Score:2)
Doesn't attaching a score to your "foes" do what you want? Pick someone as a foe, then go to Preferences -> Comments and set foes to have a -6 score. They're filtered out. Done.
Re:now we need to filter on submitters too (Score:2)
I want the ability to exclude stories from the homepage submitted by this "Roland Piquepaille" the same way I have avoided years of nonsense from "JonKatz".
My view of what is nonsense is obviously highly subjective; so a user configurable option seems to be the answer.
Price tag says it all. (Score:3, Insightful)
Interesting but not the next anything (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm a Data Manager for a medical reasearch non-profit and one of the most time consuming and difficult things to do is get good, reliable, interesting data out of the mountain of collected data in the database. I've had to fire off some very nasty sql queries and sit with doctors redoing statistics over and over until they are right...there's just so much room for error and so much complexity. I've also written tools to give some instant analysis to the doctors, similar to what the tableau software does. (of course, my stuff is super-simple and rudimentary, tableau has lots more functionality, but thats to be expected). The bottom line is, big deal. While that sort of data analysis is good and mildly useful, its not worth $1600 to my company when I can do it on demand in a few minutes. Plus I know what I'm doing, who knows what the tableau software is spitting out -- I'm my own QC guy. Until Natural Language Queries on databases start working right and become well featured, well implemented and widespread, its going to take human intelligence and personal knowledge of the database structure to get good data out. The tableau software is pretty, but its just not enough -- its not going to replace what I can do, and its not going to worth it enough for companies who have data managers to buy. In which case, its overpriced. It's not the next google -- its just pretty graphics. Its a nice program at $100, not $1000.
Re:Interesting but not the next anything (Score:2)
My company, for example, sells a fairly complex piece of HR software. It has a hideously large (structured!) database that captures just about everything.
Reporting, for us, is a big, big deal. Customers are constantly demanding more insight into their broken business processes.
Th
Re:Interesting but not the next anything (Score:2)
one excellent report generator:
200,000 USD per year with benefits
Users requesting expected in a 1000 person org (liberal for argument):
50
average requests by users (liberal for argument):
50
Average amount of time (max amount as given by you):
10
that means that a sql expert is idle most his year and costs only:
43,000 a year for his services as a report generator.
now your solution...
50 users
1600 a seat
80,000 for this?
this ignores current and ongoing training, lack
Ahhh, Visualization (Score:5, Interesting)
I've been working on particle systems for large scale data visualization. Even got some working code up -- see this [doxpara.com] for the results of my DNS server research (every particle is a host). It's...OK. The problem is that while a good chunk of our brain is devoted to visual processing, a good chunk of what we do is decidedly abstract and non-visual. Playing across these mental lines can usefully employ underutilized computation frameworks, but that doesn't mean that it will.
Think -- crypto on a GPU, not particularly fast (floating point and crypto only work well together in one extraordinarily obscure context).
It's alot of fun to play in this domain, and occasionally the results are really really useful (like this rendering of failed entropy generators) [doxpara.com]. But...yeah. Way too often, your output isn't as useful as a quickly resortable log file.
That's what makes it such a great challenge, of course. Few other fields show themselves to be empty of value so late in the dev cycle. (Biotech people have it worse, of course.)
--Dan
Re:Ahhh, Visualization (Score:2)
If visualization is utterly useless 95% of the time, perhaps it's that 95% of the time you're choosing the wrong type of visualization. Just putting datapoints into any random image generation system won't help you find the answers (or the questions) you're looking for.
WARNING: Astroturf (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:WARNING: troll (Score:5, Insightful)
Hi, Roland!
The fact remains that if he wants to be a slashdot editor, he ought to just write stories for slashdot, and if he wants to drum up traffic to his blog, he ought to buy a banner on this site instead of constantly somehow convincing editors to take his articles. I hope the /. editorship is getting something out of this because otherwise I'm at a loss as to why his self-promoting blog notifications are being accepted as stories on slashdot.
Decent tech blogs? (Score:2)
Roland is one of the worst. It just plain sucks. Like "I think the kid is brain damaged but he doesn't realize it" sucks.
PS - Roland, manges la merde.
Name (Score:2)
It IS a serious application (Score:2, Interesting)
Seriously it represents a great product, provided it isn't swallowed by M$FT and integrated into MS Office. I would rue that day.
Visual representation of data allows human mind to discern patterns in data more easily and this tool is built with exactly that in mind. Couple that with universal data access and export formats, and they have a killer product.
Way to Go !!!
Re:It IS a serious application (Score:2)
And this differs from dozens of other similar tools on the market how, exactly?
Will Google be the next Microsoft? (n/t) (Score:2)
Crappy DB interface (Score:2, Informative)
FTFA:
Specifications: The Standard Edition of Tableau connects as a client to three types of databases: Microsoft Access, Microsoft Excel and text files. Tableau is not a "data silo." Rather, it issues queries to these existing data sources using standard drivers.
Requirements: Windows 2000 or later release. 30MB hard disk memory
Re:Crappy DB interface (Score:2)
Business Intelligence (Score:2)
I doubt very much this will turn into something huge. It's just not different enough from the competition.
BI coupled with neural nets is probably the next big thing in mining and presenting data.
I wonder how much
This is CHEAP software. (Score:3, Insightful)
$1,600 is peanuts for business software. PEANUTS There would be plenty of companies willing
to shell that out just to TRY something like this.
Is it revolutionary? No
Is it complex? No
Is it useful? Yes
Would it take more
than $1600 to develop
it in house? Yes
Think about that for just a minute, Excel doesn't do all of this and this looks fairly easy to use.
MANY companies are willing to fork over around $400 for Office (bulk) for every one who has a computer
Maybe only 2 or 3 people in a large company would use this and it would be useful
Perhaps this will put it in perspective, when trying to do price point setting in a large volume company selling 3200 products and shipping over 5000 units (in various amounts of those 3200 products) it can be EXTREMELY taxing to figure out what's going on when you have to plot sales vs seasonal vs price changes vs competitor data. A $1600 program that can help your $500/hour accountant save time is a pretty good deal even if they use it only to set the prices of 5% of the items that iss 160 items and if you can make an extra $5 on something you ship 900 of a day the software was barely a fringing blip in cost when it might have saved your accountant 80 hours or more of work you've made out well.
For the most part I get the feeling that
Re:This is CHEAP software. (Score:2)
Re:This is CHEAP software. (Score:3, Insightful)
You are assuming that there are no other tools like this on the market, and if they are, they have failed to become the "next Google" due to inherent flaws.
I saw my first such "simplified data visualization tool" around, oh, 1982. And I have seen dozens since, ranging from $129 to $20,000/seat.
Many of them have been simple and easy to use. Problem is, the underlying business logic behind the data is not si
This sounds like a great idea for businesses (Score:2, Insightful)
Now, yes, you can do pivot tables and graphing in Excel, but a tool that can go straight to the database and is extraordinarily easy to use (read: made for dolts) is better.
Does Tableau live up to that?
Stop Roland Piquepaille! PLEASE! (Score:3, Insightful)
Karma? I won't submit, comment, or even visit for karma! That's not a reward system unless you can turn in your karma for cash. Forget it!
Please! Please censor Roland Piquepaille.
(His last name is French, isn't that clue enough?)
I don't get it (Score:2)
If only I could... (Score:2)
This is such bullshit I don't even know... (Score:2)
I told you to STOP LINKING TO ROLAND "FUCKYFACEY"s WEBLOG.
Tableau is so _NOT_ the next Google it makes me need to take an Advil.
It's a bunch of Active X controls on top of ODBC!!! Here, let me get you a medal.
This kind of OLAP crap is all over the place. At least companies like MindJet or those siggraph guys are trying to think of new ways of representing data.
Let's face it, about 50 Stanford computer science students were "down the hall" from the "Google Guys". And you know what? Mo
Polaris by any other name... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Grammer is a lost art (Score:2, Funny)
I know I'll get a few posts saying, "I understood it just fine,"
No, you'll get a few posts calling you a fuckwit because the irony of your rant is underscored by your inability to spell 'grammar'.
Re:Database Mining (Score:2)
"It supports Access, Microsoft SQL Server, and MySQL databases."
Where is Oracle?
Re:B-B-But Graphs are kewl! (Score:2, Interesting)
What!!!
[Rubs eyes in disbelief]
That's all they know how to do! The rest of us get paid to stop them and coerce them into using more reasonable tools. As far as pretty pictures of data go, try Spotfire [spotfire.com]. It's been around for years, and was never a "Google."
Re:This is bullshit (Score:2)
Even if I had not already been cured for some time, this article would have done it.
Re:Anything's worth a look (Score:2)