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Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

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Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#211

Post by mariushn »

hammock wrote: post #169
mariushn wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Feedback on your homepage, https://meltano.com/ There's no single visual on it :( Please show what kind of results one can get with this product. Contrast with https://www.tableau.com/ , which has a sample graph and "See it in action" right at beginning.

Here we all are in the comments complaining about how all the focus is on front end instead of fixing the back end, and one of the first comments to a legit alternative is "yeah so what's it look like?" !!

Reality is that both need to be covered.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#212

Post by ineedasername »

basch wrote: post #162
Arcanum-XIII wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, while doing some business analyst job for a company, the higher up keep on bringing Salesforce as something we should consider for a B2C project. Their marketing force is something to recon - and the lack of basic knowledge about what they wanted to put on the market was frightening. So, they’re not the best? People don’t seem to think clearly about this :(

Sometimes its easier to buy the second best at everything, (caught Microsoft) and benefit from everything supposedly working together, and a clear cohesive overall roadmap, than trying to stitch 200 individual products together, make them all pass data to each other naively, and hope that their feature changes and roadmaps stay aligned.

Oh yes ^^^ this. Where I work we recently upgraded from a single legacy product to another ERP, only for many secondary functions we went "best of breed" to additional SaaS products. It has had, literally, an exponential increase in the necessary resources to make them all work together. Keep in mind, the ERP we upgraded to also had modules for these secondary functions, but it was a case of Perfect-Is-The-Enemy-of-Good, and the sum of all parts is now much less than the mediocre Good we would have had with a single ecosystem.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#213

Post by kfk »

anonu wrote: post #164

One thing I've had to remind myself of - coming from a CS/Engineering background similar to most folks on HN (I'm guessing) - is that there are 2 types of people: Those who program and those who don't. To me, Salesforce looks like a big shared Excel file with a bunch of sheets. Tableau... well I can do the same thing with some scripts or spin up a web server. To others, this tech is just magical. Pay the money, do th…

Wait until a manager asks you to do something that Salesforce was not built for and IT tells you a back office resource can do it. None of those of the shelves enterprise solutions just work, they all need some degree of customization and integration. I am struggling sometimes to justify the cost of a vendor solution + customization versus just rolling out my own or an open source one that can be more easily built on top of.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#214

Post by oarabbus_ »

anonu wrote: post #164

One thing I've had to remind myself of - coming from a CS/Engineering background similar to most folks on HN (I'm guessing) - is that there are 2 types of people: Those who program and those who don't. To me, Salesforce looks like a big shared Excel file with a bunch of sheets. Tableau... well I can do the same thing with some scripts or spin up a web server. To others, this tech is just magical. Pay the money, do th…

>well I can do the same thing with some scripts or spin up a web server.

That's a massive waste of your time and effort. The maintenance costs become massive as well should you choose to create your own system. At the VERY least you should leverage existing free open-source tools such as Metabase or Superset or Dash, or free tools such as Google Data Studio or Mode Analytics, if you're not going to spend cash to get a tool like Periscope Data/Looker/Tableau. I mean this gently, but you likely underestimate the complexity of a reliable reporting/analytics infrastructure. Think about it this way - these tools are either collaborated on by a large open-source talent pool, or are created by teams of dedicated software engineers just as talented as you.

I've worked with quite a few companies in an analytics consulting type role, and your "I can do the same thing with scripts" statement is one I've heard countless times. The long-term maintenance costs and technical debt (and "rigidity cost") of rolling-your-own analytics far outweighs the cost of a true analytics platform.

If you decide to roll-your-own anyway, look at tools like DBT and Airflow to reduce long-term maintenance costs.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#215

Post by ineedasername »

sireat wrote: post #177

I stopped teaching Tableau because of the licensing costs to my students. Tableau feels more polished than PowerBI although BI has pretty much reached feature parity with Tableau. The problem is the licensing costs. PowerBI is very affordable ($10 a month) while Tableau is not($70 and UP). Tableau is basically saying, unless you have a corporation paying for the license err SAAS subscription do not bother to use us.…

>I stopped teaching Tableau because of the licensing costs to my students.

Weren't you using offer of free licenses for teaching environments? Those are full versions, albeit they do not include Server, but that's not really necessary to learn how to make solid BI dashboards.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#216

Post by oarabbus_ »

bosie wrote: post #210
oarabbus_ wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is Vega? I only found the genome browser tool, unless that is what you're referring to?

My guess is this, since we are talking about tableau: https://vega.github.io/vega/

Thanks. Seems extremely similar to Plotly upon first glance and their viz data structures.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#218

Post by souterrain »

oarabbus_ wrote: post #206
anonu wrote: post #164

One thing I've had to remind myself of - coming from a CS/Engineering background similar to most folks on HN (I'm guessing) - is that there are 2 types of people: Those who program and those who don't. To me, Salesforce looks like a big shared Excel file with a bunch of sheets. Tableau... well I can do the same thing with some scripts or spin up a web server. To others, this tech is just magical. Pay the money, do th…

>is that there are 2 types of people: Those who program and those who don't. Is that fully accurate, though? Where does that leave data scientists / data analysts? I know SQL very well, and I know python's data stack (numpy, pandas, matplotlib, plotly, seaborn, various stats toolkits). I have a strong understanding of the "programming ecosystem" i.e. concepts, terms, definitions, and so on. I understand (basic) compu…

I’d instead use the distinction “those who can sling code when necessary” versus “those who cannot/will not sling code.”

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#219

Post by philshem »

sireat wrote: post #177

I stopped teaching Tableau because of the licensing costs to my students. Tableau feels more polished than PowerBI although BI has pretty much reached feature parity with Tableau. The problem is the licensing costs. PowerBI is very affordable ($10 a month) while Tableau is not($70 and UP). Tableau is basically saying, unless you have a corporation paying for the license err SAAS subscription do not bother to use us.…

PowerBI has no Mac client.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#220

Post by ineedasername »

ackbar03 wrote: post #7

I never really understood tableu, it just makes fancy graphs from your data doesn't it? What's new about it?

Coming from an enterprise background in BI using traditional tools like Cognos and Business objects, Tableau is head an shoulders above these. It's not only significantly easier to build complex interactive dashboards with Tableau, Tableau enables a level of rapid data exploration that simply isn't possible in the traditional tools. In those, you pretty much needed to know exactly what you wanted to build, making it difficult to find new insights.
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