Amazon QuickSight – Business Intelligence by AWS • Hacker News Board

Re: Amazon QuickSight – Business Intelligence by AWS

#61

Post by brador » Wed, Oct 07, 2015, 5:45 PM UTC

ohitsdom wrote: post #57

brador wrote: post #31

I say: Bezos is the #1 CEO in Tech right now. Amazon takes risks, and ships innovative products and services every month. Their risk taking is relentless and they take failure in their stride. They "get" how to do push. No other tech company comes close to their pace. And the key to that is the juicy under the radar micro manager that is Jeff Bezos. If there was an award for best tech CEO. 2015, i'd nominate him in a…

Amazon has been busy, but I still have to go with Satya Nadella. Since he's gotten the job in early 2014, Microsoft has shipped amazing things. Many of his decisions have helped redefine company culture, for the better. Amazon has shipped a lot, but I think the new Microsoft has a bigger impact. Off the top of my head: open-sourcing .NET, SSH to Windows, Surface product line, Hololens development, Windows 10 (hit a f…

Satya has made some huge changes, and they're moving, but it's a beast of a company to push.

Win 10 still has a chance to hit a home run and make his name, but only if hard decisions are made. That 6.63% market share could be easily 25%+ right now, somethings gone wrong and they need to look at that and fix before users find the alternatives.

Re: Amazon QuickSight – Business Intelligence by AWS

#62

Post by brador » Wed, Oct 07, 2015, 5:47 PM UTC

astazangasta wrote: post #59

brador wrote: post #31

I say: Bezos is the #1 CEO in Tech right now. Amazon takes risks, and ships innovative products and services every month. Their risk taking is relentless and they take failure in their stride. They "get" how to do push. No other tech company comes close to their pace. And the key to that is the juicy under the radar micro manager that is Jeff Bezos. If there was an award for best tech CEO. 2015, i'd nominate him in a…

One of the most destructive aspects of the mythology of modern tech culture is this ridiculous worship of CEOs, as if they are supermen and the thousands of creative people who actually build the products we enjoy are just the gloves these heroes wear. Stop doing this. You're devaluing the worth of everyone here.

It's his name on the door. The buck stops there.

(And he's driving the culture.)

Re: Amazon QuickSight – Business Intelligence by AWS

#63

Post by nugget » Wed, Oct 07, 2015, 5:48 PM UTC

astazangasta wrote: post #59

brador wrote: post #31

I say: Bezos is the #1 CEO in Tech right now. Amazon takes risks, and ships innovative products and services every month. Their risk taking is relentless and they take failure in their stride. They "get" how to do push. No other tech company comes close to their pace. And the key to that is the juicy under the radar micro manager that is Jeff Bezos. If there was an award for best tech CEO. 2015, i'd nominate him in a…

One of the most destructive aspects of the mythology of modern tech culture is this ridiculous worship of CEOs, as if they are supermen and the thousands of creative people who actually build the products we enjoy are just the gloves these heroes wear. Stop doing this. You're devaluing the worth of everyone here.

One manager's decision can make the work of hundreds of people worthless or even destructive. I've lived thru and seen it. Like it or not the shot callers at the top wield enormous influence and the ones who make consistently good decisions should be celebrated for that.

Re: Amazon QuickSight – Business Intelligence by AWS

#64

Post by wpietri » Wed, Oct 07, 2015, 5:48 PM UTC

ececconi wrote: post #9

I've been working exclusively in implementing BI solutions for the past five years. The thing that depresses me the most is not that BI solutions take forever to implement and cost a lot, but that clients many times just don't understand the data they are trying to report on. Many times it leads to over-engineered BI solutions just for one report that a client says is mission critical, but is never used. I'm sure mor…

> one report that a client says is mission critical, but is never used.

My dad started developing software in the late 60s. As a kid (let's say circa 1982, definitely in the minicomputer era), I remember him talking about a problem at work: to do all their daily processing, they needed about 28 hours. A lot of the workload was reporting, so he asked managers what reports were no longer useful. Naturally, he was assured that every report was absolutely vital to proper functioning.

His solution was just to start dropping reports. If anybody complained, he'd put them back in the job list. A significant number of reports went unlamented, and soon the computer was able to complete its daily workload handily.

The lesson I took from this is that expressed desire is often very different than actual need, so separating the two can pay big dividends. I've never used that trick, but the lesson runs all through my methods.

Re: Amazon QuickSight – Business Intelligence by AWS

#65

Post by erik-n » Wed, Oct 07, 2015, 5:49 PM UTC

>Super-fast, Parallel, In-memory Calculation Engine (“SPICE”)

Now that's a nice acronym! I think Amazon have skilled people in charge of marketing. They make their announcements feel exciting but not too "markety".

Re: Amazon QuickSight – Business Intelligence by AWS

#66

Post by enraged_camel » Wed, Oct 07, 2015, 5:49 PM UTC

ececconi wrote: post #9

I've been working exclusively in implementing BI solutions for the past five years. The thing that depresses me the most is not that BI solutions take forever to implement and cost a lot, but that clients many times just don't understand the data they are trying to report on. Many times it leads to over-engineered BI solutions just for one report that a client says is mission critical, but is never used. I'm sure mor…

Forget the data. Many companies don't even understand their own processes. I've gone to so many HR departments and asked them how their hiring process works and met blank stares, because there wasn't a single person who knew the entire process from start to finish. Each individual knew bits and pieces, and made assumptions on how the rest of the process worked. Even though my main role is software implementation (enterprise), I spend a ton of time interviewing people and putting those pieces together. It's probably the least favorite part of my job.

Re: Amazon QuickSight – Business Intelligence by AWS

#67

Post by mmaunder » Wed, Oct 07, 2015, 5:55 PM UTC

nostromo wrote: post #2

At first glance, this seems like a Tableau competitor. So I'm surprised to see Tableau listed as a partner.

Agreed re Tableau being a competitor. But I'm not surprised they're not a partner. Last quote we got from Tableau for desktop was $2k. This comes in at around $200/year. That is probably where the "1/10th of the cost of traditional BI solutions" comes from at the top of the home page.

Re: Amazon QuickSight – Business Intelligence by AWS

#68

Post by matsur » Wed, Oct 07, 2015, 5:57 PM UTC

jrockway wrote: post #33

brador wrote: post #31

I say: Bezos is the #1 CEO in Tech right now. Amazon takes risks, and ships innovative products and services every month. Their risk taking is relentless and they take failure in their stride. They "get" how to do push. No other tech company comes close to their pace. And the key to that is the juicy under the radar micro manager that is Jeff Bezos. If there was an award for best tech CEO. 2015, i'd nominate him in a…

Is this product much different from Google's BigQuery?

BigQuery's AWS analog is Redshift -- this is more akin to Tableau/Mode/Periscope/Chartio etc.

Re: Amazon QuickSight – Business Intelligence by AWS

#69

Post by wpietri » Wed, Oct 07, 2015, 5:58 PM UTC

saosebastiao wrote: post #43

brador wrote: post #31

I say: Bezos is the #1 CEO in Tech right now. Amazon takes risks, and ships innovative products and services every month. Their risk taking is relentless and they take failure in their stride. They "get" how to do push. No other tech company comes close to their pace. And the key to that is the juicy under the radar micro manager that is Jeff Bezos. If there was an award for best tech CEO. 2015, i'd nominate him in a…

I'd say Andrew Jassy is the person you are looking for. Jeff Bezos doesn't give a shit about the day to day strategy of AWS or any other existing Amazon business. He has implicitly said as much in his speeches at Amazon. He really only cares about the next billion dollar business to build within Amazon. Jassy leads AWS, which is the only technologically innovative part of Amazon. The retail side of Amazon is a techno…

That definitely matches my understanding. As a long-time user of both Amazon and AWS (respectively 1997 and 2006), their product management strategies seem very different to me.

A lot of Amazon stuff smacks of high-level micromanagement. E.g., their thoroughly failed phone. Or the disappointing feature mish-mash that is the Kindle app. On the positive side, the original Kindle was groundbreaking because of similar micromanagement.

But the AWS stuff feels much more bottom up to me. They start with some small, discreet notion. They trial it in private, getting feedback and evolving in careful response to users. When it's solid enough, they open it up for everyone. And then they keep iterating, making things gradually better.

Re: Amazon QuickSight – Business Intelligence by AWS

#70

Post by Negitivefrags » Wed, Oct 07, 2015, 5:59 PM UTC

dang wrote: post #56

copsarebastards wrote: post #42

Currently 6 out of 30 links on HN are Amazon links, 4 of them in the top 5. Looks like someone paid for placement.

All the major tech companies bundle their announcements like this in order to make a bigger splash. It's common on such days for HN to have many announcements from the same company. As long as the stories are significant and it happens rarely, this seems ok. Edit: we buried the "preview" stories, though. That's too much when there are already several actual launches on the front page.

So what about yesterday when all the unrelated Microsoft stories were bundled together?

It was not only extremely confusing, but it also effectively destroyed the discussion on topics like the Hololense that I was keen to see discussed.