Tableau stock down almost 50% • Hacker News Board

Re: Tableau stock down almost 50%

#161

Post by rms_returns » Fri, Feb 05, 2016, 9:13 PM UTC

jrumbut wrote: post #104

gomox wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly I have never used anything similar to Tableau in the balance of "straight-forwardness" and quality of results. My use case is: here's some data, let's take a look at it and make some decent graphs including any sort of comparative analysis. Excel is... well, Excel. The kitchen sink bundled in it contains pivot tables. Graphs are hideous out of the box, and very limited. Apple Numbers makes cute looking graph…

I think if you are a smaller operation and you have specific requirements that you've thought out and aren't covered well by basic tools, then getting comfortable with JS and SQL (or R or matplotlib or Jupyter or whatever) is going to be the best way. I've spent too much time watching people spend months and tens of thousands trying to bend 12 different third party tools together when a developer could do the whole t…

This. Freelancing is the future. Hiring in-house developers, or better still, freelance programmers will ensure that you will have custom-built your maximum BI tools and with a reasonable price. Of course, finding and hiring good freelancers who are not only dedicated in their craft, but also reasonably priced is a bit involved task, but certainly doable.

Re: Tableau stock down almost 50%

#162

Post by refurb » Fri, Feb 05, 2016, 9:15 PM UTC

vvanders wrote: post #78

refurb wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TSLA is getting hammered because analysts don't believe they'll sell as many cars as they say. Some of it due to lower gas prices.

I don't think gas prices impact the Model S/X, the price point is just too high to be a bracket where that's a major factor. I think that for the Model 3 they're going to be production constrained to a point where we'll see gas prices come back to normal. Also a big factor in the TCO is the lack of maintenance and overall simplicity in a electric drivetrain and that's completely independent of gas prices.

Agreed! It's the Model 3 that is aimed towards the economy segment which is dependent on higher gas prices.

Re: Tableau stock down almost 50%

#163

Post by CamperBob2 » Fri, Feb 05, 2016, 9:20 PM UTC

femto113 wrote: post #103

nevi-me wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nail on the head regarding either selling a lot cheap, or little at high price. They went for the latter as you mention. I manage software licenses at my employer, and have been put off the price of Tableau, and the inflexibility they have. We're a consulting house, and mostly use Qlik. We started using Tableau last year. The problem for us is that as a consulting house, our staff turnover rate is high (as expected I…

A recent client of mine dealt with this by buying dedicated laptops to run Tableau on, when you needed to use it you just tracked down one of them. Seems like there should be a rule of thumb around this--software licenses should not be so expensive or inflexible that it's cheaper to buy a dedicated $1000 piece of shareable hardware than to get one for each user.

What keeps you from running Tableau in a VM that any number of people can open independently?

Re: Tableau stock down almost 50%

#164

Post by CamperBob2 » Fri, Feb 05, 2016, 9:22 PM UTC

TheLogothete wrote: post #147

cscharenberg wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The product is awesome. I made some really neat visualizations and analyses with it during an MBA project using the 15-day trial. But it's ridiculously expensive - $1000 per year with some real limitations on how many data sources you can connect. If I could dabble with it for $50/year I would. $1000 though? That limits their market tremendously to big companies only. It's hard enough to get an $80 tool approved. --…

Tableau is an enterprise product and it's one the cheaper ones out there. You can't offer that kind of a product for $50/year.

You can't, but Microsoft can.

That's what the rest of the world might call a "bad omen."

Re: Tableau stock down almost 50%

#165

Post by click170 » Fri, Feb 05, 2016, 9:22 PM UTC

joombaga wrote: post #105

walker7734 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would very much like to know what particular issues you are having as well? I work at Tableau and I would like to make sure that issues people are seeing are on our radar, if they aren't already.

[1] I had to set the client-side map rendering threshold to a very high number (100000 I believe) to get maps to render at all. Server-side rendering doesn't work, even though it can contact the map servers and display all of the examples in the documentation (Miami/Havana I think?). [2] It's been a few months, but I remember getting the license activated offline was a weird process. Something like, point tabadmin to…

Offline license signing is a solved problem, Sophos for one has figured this out with the way they license their UTM product.

When they give you a license file, it's cryptographically signed with their GPG key, and the public key resides on the appliance for verification. All you have to do is get that license into the system, either by USB key, typing it in yourself in Vim, or simply uploading the license file in the webUI if you have access to it.

Re: Tableau stock down almost 50%

#166

Post by deadlycrayon » Fri, Feb 05, 2016, 9:23 PM UTC

tootie wrote: post #44

pinaceae wrote: post #5

huge corrections under way, guarantee this is not the end, just the beginning. unicorn slaughter. upside: expect house prices in the SF bay area to become more affordable.

Tableau and LinkedIn aren't exactly early-stage startups. They have pretty established businesses.

True, but the performance of your neighbors affects investors' attitudes in general.

Re: Tableau stock down almost 50%

#167

Post by rms_returns » Fri, Feb 05, 2016, 9:25 PM UTC

gomox wrote: post #88

PaulHoule wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a pretty good product but everybody and his brother sells analytics and visualization tools, most of the companies that have been around a while sell a few different tools since they've grown by acquisition. Tableau is more differentiated than it looks, but it doesn't look very differentiated. If Microsoft ever gets around to making many of the "smart" features in Excel actually work (i.e. csv import and automat…

Honestly I have never used anything similar to Tableau in the balance of "straight-forwardness" and quality of results. My use case is: here's some data, let's take a look at it and make some decent graphs including any sort of comparative analysis. Excel is... well, Excel. The kitchen sink bundled in it contains pivot tables. Graphs are hideous out of the box, and very limited. Apple Numbers makes cute looking graph…

> And I have to put stuff in SQL and do the plumbing if I need any meaningful preprocessing.

Actually, the plumbing isn't as difficult as most people make it out to be. Nowadays, its the era of abstraction and FOSS infrastructure tools like jQuery, Bootstrap and like you mentioned, Highcharts. I'm a freelancer who quite recently developed a Tableau replacement for one of my clients. This client realized that all he basically wanted from tableau was a chart and some basic data manipulation like sorting, filtering and grouping (count, sum, average, etc.). All the things needed to develop this little app already existed in the FOSS world:

1. Highcharts/jqplot for charting.

2. Twitter-Bootstrap for showing a professional front-page and UI elements.

3. jQuery and jQuery-ui for DOM manipulation, AJAX handling for SQL queries, enabling drag/drop, etc.

4. PHP/Mysql on the backend (which is needed in anycase).

As for plumbing, each of these tools is so well-documented and also a simple Google search will point to tons of StackOverflow links that happily provide an answer to any and every question you may have!

tldr; Library/Framework plumbing might seem complex initially, but for a practiced Web-Developer, its like a cake-walk!

Re: Tableau stock down almost 50%

#168

Post by clintboxe » Fri, Feb 05, 2016, 9:31 PM UTC

physcab wrote: post #90

Tableau is a good product. I use it daily. There simply is no better alternative for quick ad-hoc, enterprise-level, intuitive graph and dashboard making. I've been at large orgs where we evaluated all the cloud services like Mixpanel and the ilk, but they are very different use cases. Tableau + Redshift (or Vertica but Redshift is way less expensive) is the typical BI tech stack. When I go a client or a new job and…

Finally someone else who has felt that pain of GoodData.. I was hired to make it work after GD's consultants set it up at my current company. What a nightmare. It took a year+ but I finally convinced everyone that it was terrible and we switched to Tableau, which let us use our own db's instead of GD's terrible "logical data model"

Re: Tableau stock down almost 50%

#169

Post by EC1 » Fri, Feb 05, 2016, 9:33 PM UTC

recursive wrote: post #57

EC1 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't even know where to start to be completely honest.

Thanks for your honesty, but I hope you understand that's completely useless. I might have preferred if you lied.

To be completely honest I've never even heard of Tableau.

Re: Tableau stock down almost 50%

#170

Post by patio11 » Fri, Feb 05, 2016, 9:35 PM UTC

microtherion wrote: post #85

patio11 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Suppose hypothetically that you have an agreement from a firm to pay you money in the future. That agreement is carried on your business' books as an asset. Your friendly neighborhood tax agency is a special case of firm, which can commit to paying you money in the future. One way they can do this is, when you lose money in year N, they can let you carry that loss forward for up to X years, so that when you're taxed…

Thanks for the explanation! I would say that if your PAST LOSSES are a "material portion of your notional value" you have a pretty problematic company anyway.

This would not be uncommon for a high-growth VC-backed company. If you've raised a billion dollars and burned through $800 million you've probably lost a significant fraction of that $800 million. (Some is capitalized but much will be straight-up OPEX loss.)

If you've got, oh, $300 million in cash ($200 million in remaining investment plus we'll say $100 million in collected revenue) and another $25 million in accounts receivable then the tax asset is worth about, round numbers, $250 million, or 43% of the book value of the company.

Having to write down 43% of your book value would suck.

This is, again, not outlandish for a company on that trajectory. If the revenue is growing rapidly and forecast to continue growing rapidly the company is in a wonderful spot.