Google to Acquire Looker • Hacker News Board

Re: Google to Acquire Looker

#71

Post by Achshar » Thu, Jun 06, 2019, 2:53 PM UTC

nixgeek wrote: post #52

Achshar wrote: post #24

Me and My team have been working on a Looker alternative for a couple of years. Hope this is the right time to give a pitch. We as a company love to assist our clients with a free consultation in understanding their data better. This will take you to the direct demo: https://demo.katoai.co/login?email=demo@katoai.co&password=k... I can talk a lot about it if anyone is interested.

{"status":false,"message":"You're doing that too often. Please wait 3 seconds."}

Looks like HN hugged it too hard. We have a limit of once every 3 seconds.

Re: Google to Acquire Looker

#72

Post by 9diov » Thu, Jun 06, 2019, 2:53 PM UTC

For anyone who is not familiar with Looker, I wrote a write-up and review about it here https://www.holistics.io/blog/looker-review-and-breakdown/. Here are the key points:

- Its use of LookML provides a steep learning curve, yet provides a maintainable and reusable data modeling

- Looker's drill-down ability is decently powerful and easy to use once you are familiar with LookML.

- Looker does not have its own storage layer but instead relies on customer's data warehouses

- Looker, in essence, is a SQL query builder engine that converts business users' drag-and-drop inputs into SQL queries.

- Looker provides highly flexible and sophisticated access control and permission management, sacrificing simplicity for power.

- Looker has limited data preparation capabilities compared to other tools, delegating this task to its partners to provide these capabilities.

Re: Google to Acquire Looker

#73

Post by agentdrtran » Thu, Jun 06, 2019, 2:54 PM UTC

shakna wrote: post #57

derefr wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really, really doubt it; Google has never killed a product that it created or acquired to serve as a complement to enterprise Ads/Analytics usage. Google kills plenty of its consumer products if they don’t catch on in a big way (Reader, Google+); and it certainly “transitions” developer -targeted product/service startups into plain features (Firebase, WordLens, etc.) But this is neither—it’s BI software, for enterp…

> and it certainly “transitions” developer-targeted product/service startups into plain features (Firebase, WordLens, etc. They recently killed "Works with Nest" in favour of an Assistant-backed API that doesn't currently implement what Google acknowledges to be the most popular features of "Works with Nest". Google are more than willing to kill developer-oriented as consumer-oriented.

Nest is a consumer brand that sells consumer products.

Re: Google to Acquire Looker

#74

Post by philshem » Thu, Jun 06, 2019, 2:55 PM UTC

dudus wrote: post #47

lmkg wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Data Studio actually isn't part of GCP at all, it's part of GMP (with Analytics & DV360/DoubleClick). There are integrations between the two, but my guess is that Data Studio continues to exist in GMP and fills the role of dashboards for marketers, while Looker will fulfill the BI role.

Technically yes but datastudio is also listed as a cloud product. Datastudio actually lives in an intersection between GMP, cloud and gsuite

Yes, indeed. Lot's of connectors to non-GMP stuff:

https://datastudio.google.com/data

Re: Google to Acquire Looker

#75

Post by Achshar » Thu, Jun 06, 2019, 2:55 PM UTC

ddon wrote: post #50

Achshar wrote: post #24

Me and My team have been working on a Looker alternative for a couple of years. Hope this is the right time to give a pitch. We as a company love to assist our clients with a free consultation in understanding their data better. This will take you to the direct demo: https://demo.katoai.co/login?email=demo@katoai.co&password=k... I can talk a lot about it if anyone is interested.

What is the target market? Can small business use this? Looks pretty cool!

The target market is anyone who has any kind of data. CSV, mysql, etc. Basically Tableau but much cheaper and customisable.

We already have a few small business using Kato. They seem to enjoy that.

Re: Google to Acquire Looker

#76

Post by quirmian » Thu, Jun 06, 2019, 2:58 PM UTC

mirceal wrote: post #56

buremba wrote: post #40

Hey all, as a potential competitor of Looker, I'm not sure how I should feel about this news. :) Here are some of the facts: 1. When Google acquired Alooma, they slowed down the development and dropped the support for other destinations such as Redshift and Hive. Even though Alooma is a data pipeline tool which makes it similar to Looker's case, the deal was $150M (compared to $2.6B) so I'm not sure the comparison ma…

you should feel pretty good. i’ve yet to see a product acquired by google that did well after.

Two intellectually low quality points that get made for almost every google related news item -

1. “When will Google deprecate this feature/product/service?”

2. “None of Google’s acquisitions have done well”.

Re: Google to Acquire Looker

#77

Post by johnatwork » Thu, Jun 06, 2019, 2:59 PM UTC

JaimeThompson wrote: post #67

What is the over / under on how many days till Google kills all their products?

1.5 years

Unless they say put out a statement to commit their efforts into keeping it the way it is.

If that statement comes out, then shorten it to 1 year.

Re: Google to Acquire Looker

#78

Post by specialp » Thu, Jun 06, 2019, 3:02 PM UTC

anbop wrote: post #60

mirceal wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you should feel pretty good. i’ve yet to see a product acquired by google that did well after.

YouTube, Android, Applied Semantics, DoubleClick, 510 Systems... you haven’t been looking very hard.

Yes mostly related to advertising in some way which is their core business (besides 510). I think OP wasn't remarking about the financial success of the company as a part of Google, but the absorbing by Google of former SAAS companies and finally dropping their original paying customers.

We are a Looker customer and are concerned. It seems Google is one of the only companies that can buy a SAAS enterprise product that people are paying a lot of money for, and eventually drop enterprise customers for the free* model. Hundreds of millions or even low billions of revenue isn't interesting to them it seems.

Re: Google to Acquire Looker

#79

Post by Lightbody » Thu, Jun 06, 2019, 3:03 PM UTC

brd529 wrote: post #4

Most looker instances I’ve seen are wired to redshift. How long until support for non google cloud databases is dropped, deprioritized, etc?

Look to Stackdriver for guidance: it originally supported AWS and they haven’t removed it in the years since acquisition. I think it’s safe to assume Looker will support many non-GCP datasources for a very long time.

Re: Google to Acquire Looker

#80

Post by reilly3000 » Thu, Jun 06, 2019, 3:04 PM UTC

brd529 wrote: post #4

Most looker instances I’ve seen are wired to redshift. How long until support for non google cloud databases is dropped, deprioritized, etc?

I think that Google would love to know what Redshift usage looks like in an aggregated view. It also provides another hook for them into Google Cloud.