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Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

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Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#251

Post by lazyasciiart »

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…

And those who can program are split into those who can estimate work and those who think they could replace a product like tableau with a few scripts.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#252

Post by nicolaskruchten »

ruoyucad wrote: post #223
qwert-e wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think the development of Python and Jupyter and other less known things like Vega are much more interesting. In that case you may be interested in Dash (dash.plot.ly). It’s a free and open source library that you can use to create dashboards online with Python only.

plotly aint exactly free, you get 25ish free plot and then you gotta pay.

That's not totally accurate... If you use our SaaS Chart Studio product then yes, but otherwise (i.e. in 'offline' mode) you can use our Python, R and Javascript libraries as much as you like: they're MIT licensed.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#253

Post by nicolaskruchten »

nicolaskruchten wrote: post #252
ruoyucad wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

plotly aint exactly free, you get 25ish free plot and then you gotta pay.

That's not totally accurate... If you use our SaaS Chart Studio product then yes, but otherwise (i.e. in 'offline' mode) you can use our Python, R and Javascript libraries as much as you like: they're MIT licensed.

PS: and Dash, which is what the GP was talking about, is totally free and unrelated to Chart Studio :)

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#254

Post by selimthegrim »

jamessb wrote: post #172
selimthegrim wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tableau has a research division they themselves acquired recently in Boston.

Last year they acuired Empirical Systems, "an eight-person artificial intelligence startup based in Cambridge, Mass" [1]. However, 'Tableau Research' [2] has existed for years and its researchers regularly publish at major academic visualisation conferences like IEEE VIS (InfoVis/VAST) and EuroVis (see [3]). [1]: https://www.geekwire.com/2018/tableau-acquires-mit-ai-spinof... [2]: https://research.tableau.com/ [3]: h…

Yes but they’re not hardcore statisticians like the Empirical people except for this Daniel Ting fellow

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#255

Post by bduerst »

turtlebits wrote: post #227
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.…

Tableau is free for students and teachers. (1 year license) https://www.tableau.com/academic/students . It's not crippled.

I used to teach Tableau too and while you're right, the tool still becomes useless after graduation because of the ~$1000/yr price tag.

From there, tableau becomes a "learn it just to get hired at a company that might use it" tactic, which is a valid job hunting strategy but is not something useful to learn in a data viz class, especially since there are other data viz tools the students can learn and keep using after graduation.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#256

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

oarabbus_ wrote: post #214
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…

How does Tableau make your reporting more reliable? My understanding is that Tableau can hook into different data sources -- like your warehouse and SalesForce, for example. Then you can write some kind of SQL to generate charts.

The auto-chart generation is nice. But what about Tableau makes it more likely to be accurate? Aren't you just as likely to make an error on the SQL in Tableau than if you didn't use Tableau?

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#257

Post by cycrutchfield »

capkutay wrote: post #243
himlion wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, Tableau is very expensive. Way more than a few weeks of dev time.

Ah of course. Just a few few weeks of dev time to build the same thing a multi-billion dollar company sells. Then after a few weeks of dev time you find out you're missing about 80% of the features that makes tableau useful. After that few weeks your manager asks you how the project is going and you just mutter something about how you should probably just buy looker or tableau.

Nah, these sorts of folks are far too obdurate and prideful to ever willingly admit defeat. More likely they would keep telling the manager that they just need a few more weeks time to finish it while they frantically keep rolling that Sisyphean boulder up the hill.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#258

Post by oarabbus_ »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #256
oarabbus_ wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

How does Tableau make your reporting more reliable? My understanding is that Tableau can hook into different data sources -- like your warehouse and SalesForce, for example. Then you can write some kind of SQL to generate charts. The auto-chart generation is nice. But what about Tableau makes it more likely to be accurate? Aren't you just as likely to make an error on the SQL in Tableau than if you didn't use Tableau…

I never said that about tableau in particular, which is why I listed half a dozen analytics platform solutions. Using any of those makes for a more powerful, flexible, sharable, usable tool than one engineer's self-rolled internal webpage with "analytics". Nothing special about Tableau in particular, in fact, I categorically prefer SQL-based visualization tools over Tableau.

The only exception to "using any of these is better than creating your own" is large companies like Google and Facebook, where they have entire teams of engineers who are dedicated to creating an in-house SQL+Visualization tools. It is absolute hubris for one engineer to think they can make a robust analytics platform!

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#259

Post by cycrutchfield »

stewbrew wrote: post #226
selectodude wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tableau is $850/yr per seat. Very expensive might be overstating things a little.

So how many seats are needed to hire somebody who creates a custom shiny + R app that does exactly what you want? How big is the average company that makes use of tableau etc.? Let's do the math ...

It’s 2019. Are we seriously still trying to argue that homegrown solutions are overall more cost effective than SaaS? Are we still of the opinion that developing tooling outside of your company’s core competencies is somehow adding value?

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#260

Post by oarabbus_ »

in9 wrote: post #241
oarabbus_ wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

you are a programmer. At least in my book. You may not be experienced in architecting software projects, or writing highly maintainable code, or dealing with niche frameworks and tools (gui frameworks, network systems). But that is just a lack of training, interest, opportunity, etc...

This is nice to hear. Truth be told, I'd like to get some professional software engineering experience. The problem for me is:

1. It's hard to get considered to be a SWE in the first place when your job titles are more in the realm of data analyst. They'll toss out my resume for a fresh grad, much less someone with experience, without a second thought.

2. If I were to make the switch I'd likely have to start at level 0 on the scale ladder. I've already career changed once into tech, and at this point I do not wish to "reset" my experience another time

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