
Tableau stock down almost 50% - sideband
http://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE%3ADATA
======
physcab
Tableau is a good product. I use it daily. There simply is no better
alternative for quick ad-hoc, enterprise-level, intuitive graph and dashboard
making.

I've been at large orgs where we evaluated all the cloud services like
Mixpanel and the ilk, but they are very different use cases.

Tableau + Redshift (or Vertica but Redshift is way less expensive) is the
typical BI tech stack. When I go a client or a new job and ask them what they
use for analysis and if they say "Good Data" or "MicroStrategy", I know my job
will be a pain in the ass to get done. Its as if you're interviewing for an
engineering job and they say "oh we all use NotePad here". Its night and day
in terms of productivity.

I don't know what this means in terms of the stock, but all I can say is that
I vouch for the product and think it has a lot of room to grow (from a BI
perspective).

~~~
babo
Tableau is a great product but with a high price stigma. I really like it,
when clients asking for recommendation my first answer is Tableau. They like
the product and the features but the reaction is always the same: nice, but
it's too expensive for us, we'll go with PowerBI. Competing with Microsoft is
a tough game.

~~~
chris_wot
It's not PowerBI they are competing with. It's Qlikview. Their biggest issue
is that Qlikview is viral: you can use the evaluation version ("personal
edition") for as long as you want, but it has restrictions. With Tableau, you
get a 15 day trial. Consequently, it gets used in businesses for small data
projects, gets seen to be really effective, then the business realises it's
effective and buys licenses.

Tableau isn't SAP, it just isn't. If they want to really get into businesses,
then they need to be sensible and give people the opportunity to use it and
then get it into the businesses they work in.

For instance, I used Tableau to learn it for the 15 days they gave me, and I
learned quite a lot as they have great documentation, but then after the 15
days I got no more opportunities to go through their tutorials. Partially I
got busy on other things and wanted to revisit it after a few days, but I also
setup SQL Server SSAS which took me a bit of time. I got a maximum of about 5
days usage, after that there's no point having it on my workstation as it's
far too expensive for me to justify buying a copy.

If I could have had more time with the product, I guess I'd know how good it
is so I can recommend it to the business I work at. Unfortunately, I can't
without cracking their trial limit code, which I'm just not prepared to do.
For now, I guess I'll be recommending Qlikview which is a known quantity and
very good also, though nowhere near as intuitive.

~~~
physcab
This is definitely an issue. It's difficult to really sell a tool like this to
your managers unless you can prove over time it saves you. With orgs I've been
at the decision process was like

    
    
      - order 1 license to test it out
      - analyst gets order of magnitude work done more than co-workers
      - team manager buys 10 licenses and a tableau server

------
chollida1
Though the outcome is a bit worse than I think most predicted, this has been
telegraphed since about November of last year. Tableau has had a very high
short interest ratio for sometime, everyone was expecting poor results.

What really exacerbated their issue was that they didn't get out in front of
this and let people know how bad they were going to miss. So when they
released earnings everything went to shit on them.

I can't really find any excuse for this that passes Occam's razor except to
assume this is a very rookie CFO /CEO combo in charge.

I made a comment about 3 months ago saying that 2010-2014 were very kind to
new tech IPO's and 2016 would be the year that companies would have to either
make money or face the consequences.

I'm following this over the next 2 weeks to see what the stock does. Its now a
pretty good Pre-Merger Arbitrage(take over candidate) candidate.

\- Market cap under 5 Billion, check

\- Institutional owner ship > 50%, check

\- Insiders hold less than 5% of the company, check,in fact its at 1.09%, wow,
management doesn't even want to own the company!

\- below its IPO price, not yet, that was $31 but its still falling.

~~~
jonknee
It would make a nice acquisition for Microsoft...

~~~
TheLogothete
Not after all the investment in powerbi, sadly.

~~~
greggyb
About the time Power BI was hitting general availability, Microsoft was
announcing the acquisition of Datazen, an alternative mobile dashboarding
solution. Both technologies are components of SSRS in SQL Server 2016.

Acquisitions aren't out of the question where MS BI is concerned, even with
apparent conflicts in product.

------
tomasien
I don't know what Tableau Software is and I found it pretty amazing that when
I Google it I could still not figure it out because all the results were about
the stock price. I think people might be focusing too much on stock price is
Googling a company's name doesn't result in seeing the company's website on
the first page of results.....

~~~
gomox
Tableau is a surprisingly good desktop application for business intelligence
and analytics that, IMO, grew too big for its own good. You plug it into data
(spreadsheets, databases, you name it) and it makes it very simple (drag-and-
drop simple) to crunch some numbers and produce interesting graphs,
visualizations and analysis.

Some clever stuff they had was (early-RoR-style) guessing of data semantics
based on heuristics (Column labeled "date"? probably worth grouping by months.
Number pairs like -0.3242,0.12345 ? probably worth plotting on a map).

I have used trial and educational versions in the past and was always pretty
impressed with the ease of use and the results. The product itself was > $1k
so I never actually purchased a license.

Even though I didn't follow the strategy very closely, from what I've run into
it seems lke their offerings were all over the place. I saw a local newspaper
using a hosted Tableau product to display data visualizations on their pages
(the kind of visualizations made by a company whose DNA is desktop apps, so
kind of underwhelming). Their website is all about Gartner and enterprisey
lingo.

The product itself is, well, some advanced version of Excel. This means you
either sell a lot of it very cheap, or very little of it for a lot of money.
Website design suggests the latter. Too bad it seems to not be working.

I'm honestly sad to see them do badly as I think the product was really
innovative and it really changed my way of thinking about report building and
analytics tools.

~~~
PaulHoule
It's a pretty good product but everybody and his brother sells analytics and
visualization tools, most of the companies that have been around a while sell
a few different tools since they've grown by acquisition.

Tableau is more differentiated than it looks, but it doesn't look very
differentiated. If Microsoft ever gets around to making many of the "smart"
features in Excel actually work (i.e. csv import and automatically choosing
what kind of graph to make) they will have nothing to stand on.

I'm just waiting for the street to realize that Hortonworks and their
competitors also have zero moat, and if anything, a GUI interface for a Hadoop
cluster is value subtraction in the age of devops.

~~~
gomox
Honestly I have never used anything similar to Tableau in the balance of
"straight-forwardness" and quality of results.

My use case is: here's some data, let's take a look at it and make some decent
graphs including any sort of comparative analysis.

Excel is... well, Excel. The kitchen sink bundled in it contains pivot tables.
Graphs are hideous out of the box, and very limited.

Apple Numbers makes cute looking graphs, but is extremely basic.

Viz toolkits in JS make you code for stuff that should be straightforward, at
different levels of abstraction (Highcharts -> D3). And I have to put stuff in
SQL and do the plumbing if I need any meaningful preprocessing.

Self-proclaimed "business intelligence" tools don't really target this use
case. They solve enterprise problems like connecting to MDX sources that are
not there for me.

Do you know any other tools for this?

~~~
jrumbut
I think if you are a smaller operation and you have specific requirements that
you've thought out and aren't covered well by basic tools, then getting
comfortable with JS and SQL (or R or matplotlib or Jupyter or whatever) is
going to be the best way.

I've spent too much time watching people spend months and tens of thousands
trying to bend 12 different third party tools together when a developer could
do the whole thing in a week and it would actually do what you want it to do.

Nailing down the actual requirements is the hard part of building your own
dashboard, it sounds like you've done that. If your needs are stable-ish or
you have consistent developer resources it's going to be hard to find a better
fit than that.

~~~
rms_returns
This. Freelancing is the future. Hiring in-house developers, or better still,
freelance programmers will ensure that you will have custom-built your maximum
BI tools and with a reasonable price. Of course, finding and hiring good
freelancers who are not only dedicated in their craft, but also reasonably
priced is a bit involved task, but certainly doable.

~~~
intrasight
>custom-built your maximum BI tools and with a reasonable price Have you ever
really seen that happen? Not me.

~~~
jrumbut
That's why I was repeating the importance of him having some well thought out
requirements. In situations where this is true (and it really happens
sometimes), I've regularly seen good developers come in under budget and
mediocre ones at least come close.

------
headgasket
Linkedin is down 38%. Tesla is down quite a bit. My guess is that some VCs
were leveraged and had to liquidate positions. Free money from leverage does
not look as good when equities go down... I think we are heading for a most
violent year on the markets. Pharma and biothechs will most likely be the only
bright spots, especially anti-anxiety drugs... :-)

Keep plugging at building great software that actually helps make this a
better place. Charge for it so you can survive this downturn. It's a cycle,
this will weed out the nonsense.

~~~
bkeroack
> Linkedin is down 38%. Tesla is down quite a bit. My guess is that some VCs
> were leveraged and had to liquidate positions.

You're not a VC if your money is in publicly-traded firms.

~~~
headgasket
Did you think that as soon as a company goes public, VCs get to sell all their
stocks?

~~~
jonknee
Tesla and LinkedIn had their IPOs 5-6 years ago, they aren't being held by VC
funds. Tableau's major holders also don't include any VC funds:

[http://investors.morningstar.com/ownership/shareholders-
majo...](http://investors.morningstar.com/ownership/shareholders-
major.html?t=DATA)

------
tjpd
"Tableau Software tumbled 36% after management warned it was unlikely to
realize benefits of certain tax assets. The news sent shares spiralling
despite the software company's better-than-expected quarter. The company
earned 33 cents a share, more than double estimates."

Also their growth is down.

~~~
jsprogrammer
What is a tax asset?

~~~
patio11
Suppose hypothetically that you have an agreement from a firm to pay you money
in the future. That agreement is carried on your business' books as an asset.

Your friendly neighborhood tax agency is a special case of firm, which can
commit to paying you money in the future. One way they can do this is, when
you lose money in year N, they can let you carry that loss forward for up to X
years, so that when you're taxed on your income in year N+3 you might be able
to offset some of that income with the loss you made years earlier, reducing
the amount of tax you incur.

The guesstimated value of that offset in taxes is your tax asset. If your
marginal rate is 30%, and you can offset $1 million in revenue, the implied
value is +/\- $300k. Importantly, if you guesstimate poorly or your friendly
local tax agency decides to change rules on you in the interim, you have to
adjust the value on your balance sheet. This can be problematic if the tax
asset is a material portion of your notional value.

~~~
microtherion
Thanks for the explanation! I would say that if your __PAST LOSSES __are a
"material portion of your notional value" you have a pretty problematic
company anyway.

~~~
patio11
This would not be uncommon for a high-growth VC-backed company. If you've
raised a billion dollars and burned through $800 million you've probably lost
a significant fraction of that $800 million. (Some is capitalized but much
will be straight-up OPEX loss.)

If you've got, oh, $300 million in cash ($200 million in remaining investment
plus we'll say $100 million in collected revenue) and another $25 million in
accounts receivable then the tax asset is worth about, round numbers, $250
million, or 43% of the book value of the company.

Having to write down 43% of your book value would suck.

This is, again, _not outlandish_ for a company on that trajectory. If the
revenue is growing rapidly and forecast to continue growing rapidly the
company is in a wonderful spot.

------
swingbridge
Tableau is a decent product, but a decent product doesn't make a great
company. Main issues are:

A) Its sales team sells it as an end-to-end analytics suite, but in nearly all
actual implementations I've seen companies just use it for management to view
a dashboard... essentially just a slightly fancier version of the Excel doc
some analyst used to mail out

B) It's crazy expensive for what it is

C) If the company has actual data scientists onboard then those individuals
can do far better analysis just using free open source tools

For the above reasons and more I've seen a lot of large companies that are far
less excited by Tableau than they were a year or two ago. They've either
halted larger roll outs that were planned or just moved away from the platform
entirely. That leads to softer sales and slams the brakes on growth rates...
hence why the stock has tanked. There's also the issue of valuation multiples
against their financials which are also still frothy, even after the latest
downward movement in the stock.

~~~
infinite8s
Those are excellent points. As an exploratory tool Tableau is well worth the
money, but if you are just using it to replace some basic C-level reporting
than its really expensive for that.

------
kevinwong
Before this drop they were trading at 14x forward revenue; now they're at 7x.
Splunk was at 12x, now at 9.7x. We'll have to revisit what the typical
multiple range is for BI/enterprise saas companies.

Seems like quite the correction for an earnings beat and the removal of a ~50M
deferred tax asset though, especially since people already had negative
expectations before the earnings release.

------
bayonetz
Tableau is definitely a useful tool. Tried getting folks with Tableau skills
in previous whoishiring post. The other positions I posted got a lot of
response but not the Tableau-oriented ones. Looks like plenty of enthusiasts
in this thread through. Where were you all? Hey, in the off chance you are
Iinterested in working in Tableau at a think tank (RAND) send me (Chris) a
note at dev.hiring@rand.org.

~~~
chris_wot
There's a reason for this. Unless you work in an organization that has already
implemented Tableau, or is willing to take a punt on using it, then there is
just no easy way to get skilled up on it.

~~~
infinite8s
Tableau Public isn't sufficient?

~~~
chris_wot
Is it able to do everything the client software can do?

~~~
cdcarter
It's limited to flat files, so you have to plan ahead on what data you'll
explore. In terms of the viz - feature parity, but not quite the same at all
if you want to do exploration. Which is too bad, because Tableau's ease of
exploration is what makes it so much more valuable than PowerBI or custom d3.

~~~
infinite8s
What is it lacking in terms of exploration? I thought most of the exploratory
benefits were in the visualizations, unless you mean the ability to ad-hoc
connect to random databases and begin exploration (because you have to plan
ahead to extract flat files from those sources)

~~~
chris_wot
That _is_ a key part of the value proposition!

~~~
infinite8s
I mean in terms of learning to use the exploratory/dashboarding functionality
- it's fairly easy to do that with Tableau Public and public data sources (or
your own if you are fine with the saved dashboards being accessible to the
public).

~~~
chris_wot
Except I want to learn how to connect to a cube, and learn how to use the
software fully so I can implement it in a company.

------
wyck
Honestly I don't care about stock rhetoric, it's an awesome product I use
every week. I evaluated lot's of BI's options because it's a pricey product
and I'm super happy with it, Tableau is actually fun (because its so easy yet
powerful) and meaningful. The only other decent alternative was Qlik but it
was more pricey for the options I needed.

------
vhold
I wonder how that will affect this:

"Tableau confirms big Kirkland expansion, plans to hire 1,000"

[http://www.seattletimes.com/business/technology/tableau-
conf...](http://www.seattletimes.com/business/technology/tableau-confirms-big-
kirkland-expansion-plans-to-hire-1000/)

~~~
nfd
I'm gonna take a wild guess and say that they're going to keep going on that
guy, possibly with a bit of delay. Running joke over here is that Fremont is
basically TableauVille. Or they're to Fremont as Microsoft is to Redmond.
Hell, rumor has it that new buildings are being built in Fremont just for
their damn expansion right now (take a wild guess if you're in the
neighborhood which ones--it's not hard, just look for glass). I doubt even a
big dip in share price is gonna quash their thirst for real estate for very
long.

------
brooklyndude
I can hack d3js. Can crunch billions of records in a flash of the eye, can
wrangle most any DB (NoSQL, et al) out there, why would I need Tableau?

Answer: We want someone stable! Not some crazy hacker. Plus if we don't spend
the cash, we don't have it in our budget next year.

Oh, I get it now. :-)

~~~
npalli
No you don't get it. Tableau is for people who can't hack (or don't want to
hack) d3js or crunch billions of records or whatever techie thing you seem to
be so proud of. The mission is supposed to be self-service business
intelligence, i.e, allowing a typical business analyst to drag drop and create
good visualizations and analytics. Not dick around and waste time with
databases and javascript.

~~~
243464646
Except that it only lets you do a set number of things. Most requests for
information are not simple, and once you leave the comfort of simplicity, you
have to become an expert in tableau, or in many cases, just accept that it
can't do what you want it to do.

Unless your queries are very simple, you are better off finding a programmer
and asking them to do your job.

------
kumarski
The analytics space is over-crowded.

Software eats the world and the education system. It's becoming increasingly
easy to find developers. [https://gh-prod-ruby-
images.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/image/f...](https://gh-prod-ruby-
images.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/image/file/39/github_repositories-800x447.png)

To some extent, companies might be trying to use too much data? Who knows.

Life Time Value capture in the analytics space is sufficiently difficult.
Let's say you're an analytics customer:

Early stage customer: Use any one of the 100 integrations analytics companies
listed on segment.com's website. You DO NOT need to track hundreds of
parameters. Conversations with customers have 100x the value of tracking the
small things at this stage....usually.

Mid-Stage Customer: Maybe you choose one of the 100 companies that makes the
most sense. You start paying for it.

Having these early and midstage companies as customers is tough. The vast
majority of them fail.

Big Customer: SnowPlow Analytics? Splunk? Tableau?

That being said, I think there's businesses to be built, but only semblances
of unicorns and minotaurs.

15,000 web and mobile apps are coming out tomorrow. What % of them are
analytics related applications? (Hint: A larger one than you might think).
Just have a gander at the applications that are listed on promotehour.com and
startuplister.com's list of app launch sites. There's now 100+ launch sites.

To win big in VC money, you have to take risks, the analytics space seems well
established with a slew of best practices that are extremely well known. Ie.
not risky enough to warrant pouring VC-istan money into.

------
sitkack
Devops everywhere celebrate.

~~~
mrfusion
Why?

~~~
andrewvc
If you've ever run tableau server, you know why.

~~~
walker7734
I would very much like to know what particular issues you are having as well?
I work at Tableau and I would like to make sure that issues people are seeing
are on our radar, if they aren't already.

~~~
wsh
Thanks for asking. I just installed 9.0.4, and here are a few examples:

\- Tableau Server runs only on Windows, so why can't it use a TLS certificate
and key from the CryptoAPI certificate store, rather than requiring these to
be converted to PEM format (with Unix line endings!) and saved in the file
system?

In an enterprise with an internal CA using Active Directory Certificate
Services, these extra steps have to be done not only at installation but also
every time the certificate expires. Compare the experience with Microsoft IIS:
the server automatically requests a renewal from AD CS, retrieves the new
certificate, and begins using it.

\- Tableau Server should be able to run as a Group Managed Service Account, so
we can give it access to remote data sources without having to assign (and
regularly change) yet another service account password.

\- It would be helpful to have an scriptable installation process; as far as I
can tell, there's no way to install Tableau Server without clicking through
wizards.

~~~
walker7734
Thanks for the input. I am going to forward these on to the server dev team
and follow up with them in person. They may be aware of some of these already
but it is important to us to keep track of what is causing our users the most
headaches. I appreciate you taking the time and letting me know your
suggestions and the issues you are having!

------
jetcata
Atlassian is currently down 23%.

~~~
sideband
Splunk is down about the same today as well:
[http://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3ASPLK](http://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3ASPLK)

------
edwinnathaniel
New Relic also down by 25%, crazy day for Silicon Valley.

~~~
nemo44x
Which is pointless since they had a great earnings report, were cash flow
positive for the quarter and raised their guidance. Additionally they
mentioned in the call that no sector is more than 20% of their customers so
they are diversified if a certain sector really tanks - like tech. They have
180 million in the bank so won't need credit markets any time soon and
gradually approaching profitability.

Disclaimer: I have a position in NEWR and added today at the 21 level. This
will certainly bounce back in the comings months or years. Will add if the
irrationality continues.

~~~
simo7
Just looked at it. No profit and trading at 10x revenues.

You might be right who knows, but can't realy say the fear on this stock is
irrational at the moment, imho

~~~
nemo44x
It's trading at about 6x revenue right now and even lower when looking at
forward revenues.

Their growth is tremendous and are on a path to profitability. I get it - when
the market are getting banged around like it is, there are few safe places. I
just think the baby is being thrown out with the bath water in a lot cases.
I'm using this to average down a bit and hold.

~~~
simo7
Yeah I see your point, but what I mean is that when so much of the current
value of a company is based on future events, fear unfortunately is never
irrational.

And for New Relic the expectations are really high, could still turn out to be
a great business story (and I also think it will) but not necessarily a good
investment because so much of this future success is already embedded in the
price.

------
noisy_boy
I use Tableau almost daily. Initially I found it harder to work with and
avoided it for a while. On 2nd attempt, for some reason, everything clicked
into place and I now find it fairly intuitive. Some of my opinions/experiences
about it:

\- Beyond simple queries, it becomes more easier to setup a view or two behind
Tableau than to do it purely in Tableau. E.g. multiple level of latest times,
more complex aggregations etc are more easily done in SQL than via Tableau.

\- For some things Tableau doesn't do what we typically expect. Couple of
examples:

\- If you run a custom query joining two tables with some of the column names
being same in both, Tableau cannot deal with it. Setting alias for columns
using "as" works fine in SQL so I think it is not unreasonable to expect that
to work.

\- I recently tried to chart lag in request/response in microseconds. The data
is stored as TIMESTAMP in our Vertica database. However, I found that Tableau
doesn't show time more granular than seconds. That is kind of odd in today's
common low-latency high-performance technology environment

Having said that, I really like the features it offers viz. Calculated fields
which don't go away just because I change the data source, drag-and-drop
dashboard constructions, very nice visualizations etc.

~~~
simo7
What do you use it for?

If it's for analysis why not use python or R, way more powerful and full of
tools & libraries that give you speed you need?

If it's for reporting, why not to use chartio, looker or anything that
connects directly to your db?

My opinion: If you know some python or R, you might still need chartio, looker
and similar but Tableau doesn't make sense anymore.

~~~
noisy_boy
I wasn't part of the decision making effort but I believe Qikview was also
considered but the analysts preferred Tableau. It is used by the analysts as
well our for our internal monitoring/charting/analysis purposes.

~~~
simo7
I see. I've also found myself in a situation where the company was using it
and I had them drop it.

For reporting the idea of transforming & moving the data around really doesn't
make much sense when compared to solutions which directly leverage your db or
at least create an unique consistent datasource instead of many so-called
extracts scattered around.

------
WWKong
I was previously a Tableau expert at my then job. I was amazed at the missed
opportunities by Tableau to make it indispensable to organizations. The core
product was fine but it seemed like they could use a good PM to implement
features around sharing, permissions, pricing etc. $1000 license for clients
to view some basic report in a browser, the other option being a desktop
installed reader.

------
ap22213
Could it also be affected by the Amazon QuickSight preview that is going live?

~~~
cissou
likely, considering Qlikview is down 14%

------
matdrewin
There are several factors at play. I believe one of them is MS Power BI
catching up.

[https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/gartner-
positions-m...](https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/gartner-positions-
microsoft-as-a-leader-in-bi-and-analytics-platforms/)

------
irunred
Looker is a much better product.

~~~
dberg
Agree, Looker customer here. Awesome product for ad-hoc BI reporting. Sits on
top of Amazon Redshift perfectly and is quite fast for ad-hoc reporting.

------
gvenier
I'm sure Tableau has its own right place in the plateau of BI & Analytics for
big companies. As for small businesses and custom-built analytics as well as
for operational data UIs you'll probably have no alternative than hacking it
yourself with d3js. Or using it Tadaboard-like alternatives.

------
jayonsoftware
I was one of the first people to start using Tableau, I even bought a license
for my own use so I can learn (Yep sick of the 14 day trial), but these days
Excel / Power BI does most the work, Salesforce with Wave is competing with
them plus so many open source software.

------
rossjudson
About 5 minutes of searching shows me that Tableau has had a massive growth of
revenue, but a slightly more massive growth in sales/administrative expenses.
What that tells me is this: The market _loves_ Tableau, and keeps buying more
of it. But the company has serious cost control problems in its sales and
marketing departments, and has expanded there far too fast.

Anybody comparing typical open source or low cost BI solutions favorably to
Tableau hasn't used it, or doesn't value their own time. Tableau is easy _and_
deep.

Tableau's board needs to attack their out-of-control cost of sales (the pay-
me-everything egos), and hopefully ignore the internet idiot mob effect on
their stock price.

I don't own Tableau stock. I just like the product.

~~~
joeevans1000
The problem is that you make something cool in Tableau and then want to
collaborate with someone... and even if you talk them into it, soon their
trial runs out. Yes, it's powerful and featured, but today's scene is about
collaboration and sharing... and the sticker shock is just too much for that.

------
MikeOfAu
I was an early adopter of Tableau and fairly enthusiastic. But then I had a
truly terrible licencing experience with them and have, since, refused to have
ANYTHING to do with them.

Nice enough software, but a sleazy organisation. Use one of the other good
alternatives.

~~~
NotSammyHagar
What happened with the licensing? I see a few other people complaining about
this.

------
pinaceae
huge corrections under way, guarantee this is not the end, just the beginning.

unicorn slaughter.

upside: expect house prices in the SF bay area to become more affordable.

~~~
ap22213
Doubtful - if global investors aren't putting their money into stocks, they'll
just continue to buy up real estate.

~~~
pinaceae
Once you take the crazy money out of the equation, the SF Bay Area is not that
appealing as a pure real estate play.

~~~
azinman2
Russians and Chinese are a major contributor, and they're not so affected by
SV cycles.

~~~
refurb
I don't know about SV, but foreign investment is pretty dam low in Victoria,
BC, which could be used as a proxy for Vancouver. 97.8% were domestic
buyers.[1]

It's not foreign buyers driving up the market in Vancouver, it's Canadians
will to put themselves into serious debt in order to buy a house.

[1][http://www.greaterfool.ca/2016/01/31/of-debt-
data/](http://www.greaterfool.ca/2016/01/31/of-debt-data/)

~~~
seanmcdirmid
What? No, the Chinese are still heavily interested in the Vancouver market.
Since when is small Victoria a proxy for big Vancouver?

~~~
msie
Well, it's been reported that foreign buyers are invested in a lot of the more
expensive properties (> $3 million) in certain regions, but a lot of Canadians
are STILL buying Vancouver properties. There's been a lot of concern over
Canadians getting in over their heads with mortgages. It also doesn't help
that Vancouver has crappy wages.

------
simo7
Reporting --> Chartio, Sisense, Looker etc. (anything web focused without a
desktop version pretty much)

Analysis --> Ipython

No room for Tableau and similar.

~~~
infinite8s
Tableau makes most straightforward analyses much simpler than attempting to do
it in Ipython/pandas, especially when connecting to standard corporate data
warehouses (probably on the order of 10x faster). Of course you quickly hit a
ceiling in terms of complexity, but most analysts never really get to that
point.

~~~
simo7
Simple analysis usually answer recurrent questions, for this there is
reporting and Tableau is not a good tool for reporting (too slow).

For ad hoc analysis instead, there is really nothing more powerful than R or
python and it's plenty of tools & libraries that give you the speed you need.

------
narrator
Tableau is a great product, but it's very expensive, like Oracle expensive. I
used Saiku to hack together some BI dashboards for free
[http://www.meteorite.bi/](http://www.meteorite.bi/). It did the job with a
little bit of work.

------
clebio
Just curious whether anyone (else) here has experience with Bime?
[https://www.bimeanalytics.com/](https://www.bimeanalytics.com/)

------
nrjames
Interesting that Microstrategy also is down quite a bit.

------
twright
To be fair the markets are really getting beat down today. e.g. LinkedIn is
down 45% from $194.

------
samstave
Apologies if the following is ignorant:

My exp with tableau was always that they obfuscate the final query...

Fuck that.

Looker doesn't && they even allow a meta Lang on top of them.

So for you to say "just do X" leaves many less sophisticated orgs left in the
dark.

So my comment is both:

Fuck their position and yours.

I don't want to pay bullshit fees to tableau (with perf hits) && not be able
to see the final query && not need an actually fairly highly competent DBA to
know that x+x+x needs to be enabled in order for me to get to root.

If I pay service X give me the full fucking understanding as to how service
results are generated.

(Yes yes I do understand how saas blah blah works and I'm just saying I
personally find this process bullshit and immoral)

~~~
foxylad
Downvoted. Your point may not be ignorant, but it certainly seems that way
given the unnecessarily violent language.

~~~
solipsism
His/her words are too naughty to be tolerated? They offend you to such a
degree that you can't just ignore them? Come on now.

~~~
foxylad
It's more that they imply the poster is really angry. If you saw two speakers
in the street, one arguing reasonably and the other swearing his head off, I
think most people would place less value on the ranter.

~~~
samstave
Uh... Maybe you dont talk to your friends too often...

You should see me with many many of my friends - dont imply anger where there
is none, as we often get in "mock heated arguements" with smiles on our face.

I love you.

~~~
dang
It makes sense to talk that way to your friends, because you're already
friends and there are stronger bonds holding you together. That makes
shredding each other fun, because everyone knows it's in jest.

A large semi-anonymous internet forum like HN is at the opposite extreme.
We're almost all strangers and near-strangers. The community has low cohesion,
so the same behavior, with the same good intention, does harm.

You know how rugby players are famous for beating the shit out of each other
on the pitch, then going out drinking after the game? I always envied those
guys that experience. It works because they have high cohesion. They also know
not to walk up to a stranger, smack them onto the pavement, and expect to be
bought a beer later. You need to adjust for context.

~~~
samstave
Apparently, sadly, I feel a much higher sense of cohesion with the HN
community than others do.

~~~
dang
That makes sense, and yeah that is kind of sad. But HN is what it is. It would
be wonderful if the community could evolve to become more cohesive but that's
a slow process.

