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Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

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Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#261

Post by dvdhsu »

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…

As an engineer, this has really fascinated me. Tableau, Salesforce, Excel, etc. were things that never made a significant amount of sense to me. I thought mostly of Salesforce as a CRUD app (which it is!), Tableau as d3 with nicer ergonomics, and Excel as... well... something I never understood.

If this is something you guys are interested in, I started a company called Retool (https://tryretool.com) that is essentially Excel for developers. Imagine if every Excel cell — instead of being a cell — were instead a React component. So you drag and drop these components around, and you can connect them to any back-end datasource (postgres, APIs, etc.). So you could drag on a table and have it pull data from `select * from users` from postgres, and then drag on a button and have it `POST` the selected row back to your API, in order to ban a particular user. The goal is to let end users build CRUD apps (like Salesforce) around their existing datasources quickly.

If you guys have any feedback... I'd really appreciate it. We're just starting out, and really curious to get any feedback from developers. Thanks!

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#262

Post by spookthesunset »

cycrutchfield wrote: post #259
stewbrew wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Absolutely. There are tons of people I encounter every single day that seem to think it is cheaper to build everything inhouse. I think it comes from a complete misunderstanding of how business delivers value coupled with RMS-like distrust of anything they cannot completely crack the lid open and mess around with. Mostly the former, some of the later.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#263

Post by luckydata »

dvdhsu wrote: post #261
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…

As an engineer, this has really fascinated me. Tableau, Salesforce, Excel, etc. were things that never made a significant amount of sense to me. I thought mostly of Salesforce as a CRUD app (which it is!), Tableau as d3 with nicer ergonomics, and Excel as... well... something I never understood. If this is something you guys are interested in, I started a company called Retool ( https://tryretool.com ) that is essent…

so you're rebuilding Visual Basic in react.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#264

Post by enlyth »

dvdhsu wrote: post #261
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…

As an engineer, this has really fascinated me. Tableau, Salesforce, Excel, etc. were things that never made a significant amount of sense to me. I thought mostly of Salesforce as a CRUD app (which it is!), Tableau as d3 with nicer ergonomics, and Excel as... well... something I never understood. If this is something you guys are interested in, I started a company called Retool ( https://tryretool.com ) that is essent…

I would have to delve deeper to give actually useful feedback, but I wanted to say from a presentational point of view, it looks great, well done for putting something like this together

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#265

Post by switz »

dvdhsu wrote: post #261
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…

As an engineer, this has really fascinated me. Tableau, Salesforce, Excel, etc. were things that never made a significant amount of sense to me. I thought mostly of Salesforce as a CRUD app (which it is!), Tableau as d3 with nicer ergonomics, and Excel as... well... something I never understood. If this is something you guys are interested in, I started a company called Retool ( https://tryretool.com ) that is essent…

Uh this is super super cool, well done.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#266

Post by basch »

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.

*cough

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#267

Post by ed312 »

oarabbus_ wrote: post #260
in9 wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"Data Analyst" is often programmer lite. If you've been doing that work for a few years you could easily transition into a full time SWE role. If you really need a confidence boost and/or some on-trend training, consider doing a full stack bootcamp.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#268

Post by pea »

kfk wrote: post #141

So I have to deal with both tools at my company. The reality is that it all feels so incomplete from a BI standpoint. Managers are throwing money at front end tools like Salesforce and Tableau, but the entire back end stack is still pretty much the same as 20-30 years ago (big expensive Oracle-ish databases). I think the development of Python and Jupyter and other less known things like Vega are much more interesting…

Hey - I'm hacking on a product which allows you to build interactive browser-based apps/dashboards from Python and dataset blocks. You can return altair (vega) plots from your Python and they'll get rendered in the app, and we're just adding the ability to import existing Jupyter notebooks this week.

It's still really early, but feel free to have a play and create an app. Here is an example app examining using the Prophet forecasting library: https://nstack.com/apps/rdA647Q/

I'd love any feedback, and if you'd like to chat to learn more, reach out to me on leo@nstack.com.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#269

Post by solidasparagus »

oarabbus_ wrote: post #216
bosie wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Vega is nice for its declarative, portable nature. Also, it makes certain things very easy such as embedding interactive Vega charts and generating images of charts without needing something like PhantomJS.

Re: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B

#270

Post by nitwit005 »

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…

If you just want a chart based on a DB query, then yes, it's a waste of time and money. The value of a lot of these products is that they have query/charting builders, which takes a lot more effort to implement. These days a lot of business aren't willing to accept analytics being controlled by a single person or team, as they're used to anyone being able to do their own custom thing.
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