Tableau stock down almost 50% • Hacker News Board

Re: Tableau stock down almost 50%

#301

Post by nwenzel » Sat, Feb 06, 2016, 2:40 PM UTC

rms_returns wrote: post #190

ativzzz wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, question on how licensing for highcharts works as a freelancer. Do you have your client buy a single website license with you as the dev? Or you have a highcharts dev license? Or something else?

Nope, we went for jqplot ( http://www.jqplot.com/ ), it is GPL. The client initially wanted to go with Highcharts, but when we found about its licensing, I started looking for a FOSS alternative and this was what I found.

rms_returns - are you interested in discussing a project I'd like to have a freelancer work on? You can reach me at http://www.simplelegal.com and my HN username.

Re: Tableau stock down almost 50%

#302

Post by lmeyerov » Sat, Feb 06, 2016, 2:40 PM UTC

infinite8s wrote: post #292

lmeyerov wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Periscope is in a distinct, lower tier of usability. You write SQL. Or, put differently, the innovation of Tableau was so you don't have to write SQL for most visual encodings, even non-trivial ones.

However that does limit you a bit when wanting to do deeper analysis. Looker/Periscope are tools for analysts who know and are comfortable with SQL. (Disclaimer- no affiliation, just trying to build a desktop tool that sits in the spectrum between Tableau and Jupyter Notebook)

You can still write SQL in Tableau, that's table stakes.

Funny to me: it took years for Heap to introduce that.

Edit: we use and help customers with IPython/zepellin etc, but that doesn't change that these things are 10 years behind as IDE/visual interfaces. Adding charting & drilldowns is much harder than a button to turn a table into a line graph, and analysts are wasting a lot of time due to this.

Re: Tableau stock down almost 50%

#303

Post by TheLogothete » Sat, Feb 06, 2016, 2:42 PM UTC

chris_wot wrote: post #216

TheLogothete wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PowerBI has nowhere near the capabilities of Tableau. On top of that, PowerBI is subsidized in order to funnel customers for SQL Server.

Qlikview costs quite a lot and I'd argue is also enterprise-grade, and doesn't have the same cost issue plaguing Tableau. Which is sad, because Tableau is probably the better product in many ways.

I am pretty sure Qlick deployments are way more expensive than Tableau ones because as far as I know it is more capable data modeling-wise. It is also nowhere near as polished.

Re: Tableau stock down almost 50%

#304

Post by frik » Sat, Feb 06, 2016, 3:04 PM UTC

GFischer wrote: post #298

frik wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MS SQL server is very expensive, especially thanks since their recent license changes. Microsoft BI (PowerBI, etc) is to lock you in to their ecosystem (MSSQL, Excel, SharePoint/Office365, Windows Servers/Azure cloud).

The thing is, if you already decided on MS SQL Server, why buy Tableau? The company I work for has both, and Tableau is the most likely to be dropped of the two.

Hello? The MS SQL Server license has been changed to be per CPU core. Consultants want you to create a seperate MS SQL Cluster (serveral bare metal servers with many CPU cores). So MS BI will be a lot of more expensive as you first think. Most see just the Tableau is more expensive than BI and decide for MS BI just to find out MS SQL is rather expensive. Also you need at least MS SQL Server 2014, despite dark pattern speak (lies) about that 2012 may work too. Oh and don't forget they will mention that you will need a seperate SharePoint cluster (web and app servers) to run Excel webservice and the SharePoint based dashboards. Oh and you will need to upgrade all your clients with Office 2013. And they will invite your CTO to an Windows 10 event and give away some WinPhone10 and tablets. And then you will have to figure out how to comply to local state law by upgrading to the expensive Windows Enterprise LTSB license.

So what is cheaper?

Re: Tableau stock down almost 50%

#305

Post by swingbridge » Sat, Feb 06, 2016, 3:07 PM UTC

Tableau is a decent product, but a decent product doesn't make a great company. Main issues are:

A) Its sales team sells it as an end-to-end analytics suite, but in nearly all actual implementations I've seen companies just use it for management to view a dashboard... essentially just a slightly fancier version of the Excel doc some analyst used to mail out

B) It's crazy expensive for what it is

C) If the company has actual data scientists onboard then those individuals can do far better analysis just using free open source tools

For the above reasons and more I've seen a lot of large companies that are far less excited by Tableau than they were a year or two ago. They've either halted larger roll outs that were planned or just moved away from the platform entirely. That leads to softer sales and slams the brakes on growth rates... hence why the stock has tanked. There's also the issue of valuation multiples against their financials which are also still frothy, even after the latest downward movement in the stock.

Re: Tableau stock down almost 50%

#306

Post by StanGrove » Sat, Feb 06, 2016, 3:21 PM UTC

Maarten88 wrote: post #125

r00fus wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which level of office suite do you need to get this tool?

As part of Office 365 it's in E5 ($35) or as an add-on to other levels for $10 (per user per month). There's also a limited free desktop version. https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/

The free version of the service is too limiting to be very interesting to us. However, it is available from Microsoft resellers as a standalone for about $10.00 per month per user with no contract.

The free desktop version is not limited. It's very powerful. The growth rate is astounding. We get significant new features every month, sometimes weekly.

If you compared PowerBI to Tableau 6 months ago (or even 3 months ago) you are out of date. Its data model capability is far superior to Tableau. The formatting and graphics capability is catching up quickly. The intuitive UX is first rate.

(We are NOT Microsoft employees.)

Re: Tableau stock down almost 50%

#307

Post by infinite8s » Sat, Feb 06, 2016, 3:26 PM UTC

lmeyerov wrote: post #302

infinite8s wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

However that does limit you a bit when wanting to do deeper analysis. Looker/Periscope are tools for analysts who know and are comfortable with SQL. (Disclaimer- no affiliation, just trying to build a desktop tool that sits in the spectrum between Tableau and Jupyter Notebook)

You can still write SQL in Tableau, that's table stakes. Funny to me: it took years for Heap to introduce that. Edit: we use and help customers with IPython/zepellin etc, but that doesn't change that these things are 10 years behind as IDE/visual interfaces. Adding charting & drilldowns is much harder than a button to turn a table into a line graph, and analysts are wasting a lot of time due to this.

Yes, completely agreed. There's a continuum of UX between BI tools like Tableau/Qlikview and the interactive prompts used by most data scientists (mainly around the non-interactivity of display)- it's sad that an 80 character static tty display is still the state of the art in that space. While I'm very comfortable in ipython/terminal I often wish I could easily pop up a Tableau interface on top of my pandas analysis. Jupyter is getting there slowly but the widgets people are building are still more geared toward display than interacting with data (both original and derived) directly. Even the new set of SAAS BI tools (Looker, Mode, etc) leave interaction as a secondary concern. I think that's the main difference between tools geared towards reporting/publishing (most of the BI world) and tools geared toward data analysis (R, python, etc). As you point out, the tools for data analysis are years behind the BI tools in terms of UI/UX (or their focus is more on IDEs for developers rather than analysts).

As a side note, I've been following your work for a while now (both Superconductor and Graphistry) - mind if I shoot you a few questions privately?

Re: Tableau stock down almost 50%

#308

Post by greggyb » Sat, Feb 06, 2016, 3:26 PM UTC

TheLogothete wrote: post #275

WhitneyLand wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's are some of the biggest things missing in Power BI compared to Tableau?

Those are quite big products, making feature-by-feature comparison would be quite a daunting task. It all boils down to this, in my opinion: PowerBI is for dashboards and reporting mostly. Tableau can do dashboards, but it can also do "analysis". Uncovering insights in the data that go way beyond simple cross-filtering. In my mind, they are different tools for different purposes.

You do know Power BI can call arbitrary R code for both statistical analysis and visualization?

Re: Tableau stock down almost 50%

#309

Post by solipsism » Sat, Feb 06, 2016, 3:28 PM UTC

foxylad wrote: post #263

samstave wrote: post #256

Apologies if the following is ignorant: My exp with tableau was always that they obfuscate the final query... Fuck that. Looker doesn't && they even allow a meta Lang on top of them. So for you to say "just do X" leaves many less sophisticated orgs left in the dark. So my comment is both: Fuck their position and yours. I don't want to pay bullshit fees to tableau (with perf hits) && not be able to see the final query…

Downvoted. Your point may not be ignorant, but it certainly seems that way given the unnecessarily violent language.

His/her words are too naughty to be tolerated? They offend you to such a degree that you can't just ignore them? Come on now.

Re: Tableau stock down almost 50%

#310

Post by StanGrove » Sat, Feb 06, 2016, 3:29 PM UTC

TheLogothete wrote: post #175

greggyb wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Power BI, Microsoft's answer to it is $10/mo - yes, not $50/year, but a lot closer to that than to $1,000. The vis layer doesn't need to be expensive.

PowerBI has nowhere near the capabilities of Tableau. On top of that, PowerBI is subsidized in order to funnel customers for SQL Server.

PowerBI may be subsidized or not. But in our use-cases and in their documentation, it really doesn't funnel customers to SQL Server. Sure, it plays nice with SQL, SSAS/MD and SSAS/Tabular. But it also plays nice with many, many other data sources individually and in mashup. Its internal data modeling and ETL capabilities rival the power of SSAS and SSIS and they are free -- I see them as more of a competitor to SQL than a front end to it.