Taro's Blog

The Magnificent Three of Tableau were Christian Chabot, Pat Hanrahan, and Chris Stolte. The frontman was Christian. He was the Tableau evangelist Pat and Chris seemed to be in the backseat all the time.

From a technical viewpoint, Tableau Desktop was developed in the 2000s, about a decade later than QlikView Desktop. Thus, Tableau’s GUI looked newer than QlikView. That as an advantage for Tableau

One of the secrets of Tableau’s success was VizQL. It’s a great vision, but also a marketing gimmick! “VizQL (Visual Query Language) is a proprietary declarative language developed by Tableau for query, analysis, and visualization. It serves as the engine behind Tableau’s ability to translate user interactions into database queries and generate visual representations of data.” It has the same meaning as “Data Visualization”. In other words, VizQL was not a systematic language with its own syntax, like SQL.

Another secret was the well-prepared demo dataset called “Superstore“. The dataset must be developed by seasoned data scientists and fine-tuned to perfection. That’s why Tableau looks really cool, sexy, and attractive when it is demoed by a Tableau presales..

As I mentioned in the column about Qlik, it was QlikView that became the number one in the late 2000s/early 2010s. Tableau emerged in the early 2010s and caught up Qlik in 2015, and surpassing it. However, Tableau had its own problems. Their licensing model and the way to sell the products are about to become obsolete. Tableau was selling software licences for the on-premise products that need to be installed on servers (Windows Server) and clients (Windows PC and Macintosh PC).

In 2016, Christian stepped down as CEO, and Adam Selipsky, former AWS VP of Marketing, Sales, & Support (played the COO role), took over. During the time of Adam, Tableau introduced the Linux version of Tableau Server, switched from ad-hoc licensing model to subscription-based model. Although Tableau Online, now known as Tableau Cloud, was introduced in 2013, it did not take off until Adam, the former AWS executive, arrived on the scene.

I had a huge respect for Adam. He led Tableau to the next level and eventually made the Magnificent Three billionaires by selling the company to Salesforce in 2019. In 2021, Adam moved back to AWS as CEO, and happily retired in 2024

Some good things never last. After becoming a part of Salesforce, New people came in. Old people moved on to other companies. They said Tableau lost its culture. Tableau’s old headquarters was shed in 2024.