Tableau's Future - is it falling behind? Season 5 Episode 4 | Datum Podcast

You are doing great work Tim

If tableau knew is a pricing issue why not focusing on the pricing. I don’t think they are providing premium services, more like a repackage services and selling it for more such as Einstein

The tableau cloud update is a joke, the company lost their ability to schedule their own update. This once took down our company for a day.

They need to do something to change the tide else see how fast people want to decommission tableau

Tableau is still the best!

Microsoft is bundling power BI into their already market leading office applications stack for a nominal fee. Microsoft therefore is no longer competing with tableau.- tableau needs to compete with Microsoft, and price is everything. Get the market share back and and then sell the addons.

They are doing more to empower novice users, then to promote loyal developers. Why are we wasting our time with Tableau?

Customers get attracted towards Power BI, Looker only to realize later that Tableau was the easiest BI tool

Thanks guys and thankyou v much Tim for addressing this topic. I do get what u say about Tableau being superior but the problem is that companies generally go for the cheapest intiailly. For me i see the quality of Prep and Server have gone down but i still love tableau compared to pbi. I used to be a bit angry about why tableau is going so downhill but maybe it isnt really going there and i have decided to just accept how things are and play with that is around as opposed to complaining too much. If it does sink then i am ok with that too. More important things in life than data anlysis and so on. At the end we ( as souls) are just here on this planet for a short visit and then off we go somewhere else. So i am not going to get too attached to mundane material stuff. The future is huge !

Tim and Ravi - great discussion!!!

Here are my thoughts:
- I agree with you 100% on pricing. One additional point though - a lot of the pricing complaints come from practitioners who can't control it but are wistful because it is what they hear from the CIO/CFO office, who often care less about the type of car :)
- Pixel perfect is in the category of things that are table stakes and important to the first point. Tableau should never be used for PP reporting, however, IT want to consolidate vendors, so having the feature could go a long way to making Tableau a true standard in a big corporation.
- Personally, I still use set actions more than parameters actions - multi-select is a common use case ;)
- Agree that fourth wave won't be out in a "take it to production in an enterprise way" until at least 2025.2! Shared dimensions took 3 years and it was just a feature!
- On experience, you not being an expert on the entire "thing" but how the past impacts the present would still be valuable to me!
- For survival, I think (and worry to be honest) that the next Tableau will be heavy on Tableau + AI (Einstein) + Data Cloud (and maybe Mulesoft) as a single offering to compete with Fabric, etc

(And thanks for the shout out!)

If Tableau lowers their price, people will still ask them to lower it further. That is a never ending ask in my opinion so I don't know how seriously I can take it. Does Tableau still have a solid base with good profit margins? Is its user base expanding? How is its churn rate? These would all be better indicators than the price of its product (ones that, honestly, are a lot harder to get from the outside).

PowerBI is a product for very different type of customer I feel like. If you are completely in the Microsoft ecosphere, then it makes sense to use it. But it would involve a lot of migration work if you're not and that's costly. Some features of PowerBI only work or work better with Microsoft products like Azure or SQL Server but is it worth it to move the entire tech stack over for that? And in my company's case, a lot of people are on Macs. And many who aren't on them, want to be on them (hey, if the company is paying for it, why not?). This means compatibility is the main issue for us (which Tableau fulfills) and trust me, it's a lot harder to get someone to give up their MacBook than to give up their BI tool.

Tableau needs to sort the fundamentals. Some aspects of it are very dated and poor from a UI perspective, take date controls for example. Sort that before the AI meme.

Additionally, at Tableau's price point, it needs to be the one stop shop for BI/data surfacing and visualisations within an organisation. It's all well and good advising people to show data a different way, ie not a table yet sometimes this is needed - its tables are shocking (and I shouldn't have to pay for add ons).

Re Price, when PowerBI is being offered as part of the Microsoft 365 stack as an add on thats a problem for stand alone applications, in the same way, why pay for slack Teams does the same thing? It doesnt matter if its better or worse if the person making the budget decision just sees them as A N Other piece of software, which i suspect many do.
We are still on a core server licence so i can serve dashboards to everone of our 2k employees. When we are forced to pay per user the price for Tableau is going to sky rocket and i just don't know how to justify to the money people why we stick with something that has increased in price so much.

People don't want best in class, they want close enough. They just want to get to the shops and back again with their shopping.
It doesnt help when Data Management etc is an added extra.
Prep is a dead product walking, why would i get my users to use it if you cannot schedule flows without paying extra for that ability.
99% of the time a dashboard is a living changing thing, NOT a one off analysis.

The fact that they are talking about the future of Tableau NOT AT TC was a bit of a kick tbh. and very odd.

Thanks for the great conversation! Here is my perspective as someone working with Tableau for over 7 years and now Power BI for almost one year (not enough to be as proficient as I am in Tableau but definitely enough to get over the honey moon phase and see some of the problems it has as well)

- Pricing is not as clear cut as many people think: for most of the serious reporting you probably will need Premium Capacity in PBI, which turns the price the same or sometimes even more expensive than Tableau
- Pixel Perfect from Tableau is not nearly as perfect as the marketing team poses it to be. Who hasn't dealt with designing reports on Desktop just to publish and seeing things not exactly where they are, even in fixed resolutions? Or having blurs and other anomalies that shouldn't really be there. Never had this issue so far with PBI.
- Porsche vs BMW is not a very good analogy. It's more like Porsche vs a Tesla, they are fundamentally different. Yes, Tableau is still the best tool when it comes to Data Visualization, but it seems to be frozen in time. PBI evolved into a much more mature BI tool, and it is still changing fast with monthly updates. What it lacks in Viz options, it compensates in the overall package, mainly on the Data Modelling (Power Query) and Analytics (DAX) side, but also with other important features that mature BI teams need like CI/CD and Source Control, advanced UI/UX capabilities, automation and standardization with custom JSON templates, the list goes on.
- Tableau Prep is never going a proper Data Modeling tool -> you can only build single large tables. So many years in development and it still can't handle semantic models and relationships, and probably never will with all this 4th Wave talk, which leads me to my next point:
- Tableau in it's core was developed to use single large tables. Later they added relationships but they still don't work as well as in PBI, which was developed from the ground up with sematic models in mind. You need semantic models when dealing with real world data that requires a more complex model coming from one or more data warehouses. It took years using Tableau for me to learn the difference between Dimension and Fact tables, the tool simply doesn't require this knowledge. This might work at first but at some point it will become a trap. PBI kind of forces this onto you since the beginning because it relies on star schemas for efficiency.
- Tableau also has SQL in it's core. The formulas are mostly a SQL translator, which make the tool easier to use but also limits its capabilities. DAX is harder to learn and to use, but it is basically a layer on top of more traditional SQL based formulas. In my experience so far it offers way more tools to deal with real world problems.
- Tableau + Prep + Server isn't really a platform in my opinion. It's the bare minimum you need to run the product. Power Platform, on the other hand, mainly with Power BI, Power Automate and Power Apps is a truly integrated environment that complement each other very nicely, expanding much more what a single BI tool can offer. With Fabric now, I think it will get even bigger.
- I'm grateful for the community in Public, creators like you teaching content and now other developers like Tristan from Ladataviz greatly expanding what Tableau can do, but for me that is basically Tableau outsourcing their responsibility. It took years of hacks and workarounds being discovered and instead of using it to improve the tool, Tableau now simply offers 3rd party paid apps to do what it should out of the box.
- Tableau remains my favorite tool for data analysis and exploration, but I can see why many companies are switching. In my experience so far it seems companies are evolving from building single dashboards to building more advanced data applications, and Tableau lacks the sophistication it needs to keep up, it's not just pricing.
- I'm very skeptic but optimistic with all this 4th wave talks. Tableau needs to be rebuilt from the ground up. I don't think they can keep patching what currently exists and transform it into something that can really compete with other tools on the market. I just hope that instead of cannibalizing itself as you suggested, they actually manage to keep the core experience we all love while working on the basics they lack (high on Copium from their announcement regarding components in the Tableau Conference).

Sorry for the long comment, might sound biased against Tableau but I truly hope they improve. Power BI has many advantages and features but what it lacks (as any other Microsoft tool) is the polish that Tableau has. Many people (myself included) would still choose Porsche over Tesla. The Tesla looks modern, can accelerate faster, has auto pilot and is cheaper, and yet needs you to press a button in a tablet to reverse gears.

Very interesting conversation!

Very interesting conversation!

Very interesting conversation!

Very interesting chat guys!

Tableau needs to add "enterprise features" to Tableau Cloud to support software engineering best practices such as CI/CD, automated testing and native integration with Git. Also need a spreedsheet like interface for LOB data analysts and Excel / Google Sheets knowledge workers similar to Sigma. I love Tableau and have been using for 10+ years, but without these "enterprise features" I believe that Tableau will die a slow death similar to the legacy BI platforms like Cognos, Business Objects and Microstrategy. That's my hot take

Great conversation. I love that you two british guys say "probably not bad if it's not failed right? .. it's not really gone tits ups"... and "British way of looking it"... the british way is not the "ah, it's all right".. the british exprssion here (for me anyway) is "tits up" :)

This discussion was a super helpful. I have been thinking about what level of analytics delivery is good enough for users to have informed decisions. It doesn’t need a fancy visualization at all as long as users can understand the insights in 5-7 seconds and know the call to actions are.
I have been thinking about the career development as well. Thanks for touching on this topic. Using Tableau over 7 years, I learn that a good analytics analyst needs to have data manipulation skills in order to provide a nimble and agile end to end analytics solution.
A successful analytics analyst needs to be good at asking the right questions to business users or understand what the business problem they are trying to solve. Then provide the call to action.
Otherwise, the analyst will spend hours or days to develop and learn how to visualize a fancy interactive dashboard but it won’t answer or solve the real problems.

Tableau does some very basic things very poorly. That is a huge problem. Examples, it is very hard to export a text table to excel. The server download is awful. Want to create a text table, oh you have this dumb “ABC” placeholder. Why? Oh you need a measure there. Ok, add it. Oh now I don’t have a column header on top? What the heck? I have been using tableau for a decade so I know the workarounds to these things but it is way too hard!

Personal experience. In a corp environment, it’s not price. It’s the number of hurdles to go over to be able to start using one or the other. Especially to do a job that you can share with other users, including access to own personal data and sql databases. For most customers with M365, Tableau is a lot of friction just to get going.