What does it mean for Tableau to be dead?
Reflections on the end of an era
Much of the data discussion these last few weeks has revolved around Tableau and its imminent demise. This was of course spurred by the recent announcement of Salesforce layoffs that hit Tableau (and Slack) especially hard, but a perception has long been building in the data community that the world’s most beloved visualization software has lost its way. That Salesforce only cares about Tableau in so far as it integrates with their core CRM business, and that innovation for the general analytics audience is unimportant. In short, that Tableau is dead.
The end of a way of life
Is Tableau dead? In the most obvious sense, no. The tool is not going to cease functioning tomorrow. It’s not going be replaced by a hot new startup anytime soon (though Power BI is an ever-growing threat). Tableau experts are not going to be suddenly unemployable.
But in a very real sense, the Tableau era is over. Starting roughly in 2012, the standard ‘supply chain of data’ approach to analytics picked up increasing steam. The focus of your average data team shifted to building pipelines that transform and move data as quickly and cost effectively as possible to a place where a data analyst could churn out dashboards and charts. This is where Tableau shines, and it was quickly embraced by creative people who made a lot of amazing, beautiful stuff.
However, we’ve squeezed all the juice possible from that lemon and the limitations of the one-way data highway that ends in a dashboard are becoming clear. You can see this in the exploding conversation around soft-skills, data quality and product-market fit for data teams. There’s a pervasive sense that we should be delivering something else, something more valuable built on better, more trusted data. Nobody knows exactly what that is yet but we can deliver it by being ‘closer to the business.’
And this gets us to the crux of the question - what does it mean for Tableau to be dead? It means that there’s a widespread recognition that the way of thinking about and doing analytics that Tableau ushered in is in need of modernization. It means that there’s a ‘next’ coming, just far enough beyond the horizon that none of us can see it yet. But we know it’s there, waiting for us.
This is scary, no doubt. But as someone who has been through it once before, let me assure you, not only will we be okay - we’re all coming out ahead when this shakes out.
Time is a flat circle
If you’re under the age of maybe 35, you don’t remember a world where Tableau and the Tableau way were not the standard operating procedure for data teams. For the rest of us, there is a faraway, hazy memory of an era populated with on-prem data warehouse appliances, powercenter ETL scripts and a big, beefy Cognos or Business Objects BI front end.
I can remember vividly when Tableau started taking my customers, one after another. And of course there was the disaster of the 2016 (I think) Gartner Magic Quadrant for BI, where the longtime leaders suddenly found themselves relegated to also-rans in the eyes of analysts. IBM began their valiant but ultimately doomed effort to incorporate the Tableau way into Cognos in a manner that would reverse the tide.
It was stressful, and I worried a lot about what I was going to do going forward. Would my skills be useless in short order? Should I just learn Tableau ASAP? I can tell you, in the end I didn’t become a Tableau expert - I was frankly never going to be as technically proficient as I was at Cognos, where I am very, very good. Instead I took everything I learned and started thinking higher level, more about project, practice and culture design. It was a great transition for me.
What can you expect from a ‘dead’ Tableau?
A dead Tableau will continue to be - pound for pound - the best dashboard and visualization building tool, possibly forever. Just as Cognos is still the best paginated reporting tool. There are going to be huge numbers of great jobs out there for Tableau pros throughout the 2020s and you’ll be able to make a lot of money using those skills. There is no need to panic.
I do expect some negative changes to pick up pace over the next few years though:
Salesforce will invest less and less in Tableau over time. The pace of improvements will slow, the customer experience will diminish and the community support will drastically fade.
The roadmap is going to get confused. It will align more and more with the overall Salesforce direction and less and less with the specific needs of the platform-agnostic analytics market.
There will be other tools and approaches that pick up steam. Maybe Count with the data canvas, or one of the BI notebook companies will hit big. But something will come along and Tableau will be late to adopt it and their implementation will kind of suck.
Startups and tech forward companies will move to whatever that new thing is. You won’t have a 25 person company choosing Tableau anymore.
However at the enterprise level, Tableau will continue to have a huge, deep pocketed customer base. They may become increasingly jaded with Tableau, but the cost of moving off for them is just huge. Cognos still has many, many thousands of huge customers some ten years after it ‘died.’
Jobs will slowly start to move to other platforms.
This is all from what I experienced directly with Cognos. I may be off on some of the specific points or timeframes, but I expect the overall story to play out in a very similar manner.
What will Microsoft do?
From a strictly Business Intelligence market perspective, one of the most interesting questions is how Microsoft responds. Power BI came to the BI market late, but thanks to pricing power and the ubiquity of their technology (and sales teams) across all industries it’s moved into the dominant position these last few years.
Microsoft does not have to lead on this, as they didn’t for desktop BI. They can see what new paradigms emerge and then run the Power BI playbook again. Microsoft has an obvious way to make money on whatever new BI approaches emerge simply by funneling the compute onto Azure. This is pretty much the whole reason Power BI exists in the first place.
Salesforce and Tableau don’t have this option, which puts them in a tough position and makes the level of investment needed to pivot to the changing needs of the 2020s unlikely. In my opinion.
What should Tableau pros do?
My advice is, don’t just do something - stand there! You have plenty of time to navigate whatever changes are coming. It’s going to be frustrating watching a tool you love lose its way, but I wouldn’t freak out. You can transition to other tools if you want to stay hands-to-keyboard, or you can explore what other options exist in the data space, as I did.
I don’t worry about Tableau people. The tool has attracted creative, flexible thinkers over the years, and their passion has transformed how we communicate with data for the better. People like that roll with the punches and are gonna land on their feet, no matter the landscape.
PS! You made it all the way to the end, so there must be something you liked! Why don’t ya go ahead and…
Great post. Having lived through many of these evolutions, I keep coming back to Steve Jobs talking about disintermediation. Its better for you to disintermediate yourself than have a competitor do it. Everyone knows this inherently but it is almost impossible to do in the moment. How can you risk killing your cash cow? How can you do it in the face of a massive installed base? Satya Nadella famously did this with Microsoft and Azure, but so many companies kicked the hard decision down the road and paid dearly for it. Oracle and IBM should have major players in the Cloud. Teradata should have been a player in Cloud Data Warehousing. I could list a hundred examples. One thing about technology--it's never a dull time, and the only constant is change.
Great observations. I was a PowerBuilder expert in the '00s, back when you could earn $150/hr with it. That tool eventually died, but the skills I gained at relational database design and query performance kept my career afloat.