The $900 Secret That's Confusing Tableau's Brand

0:00Okay, day two, perspective number two, Tableau Public doesn't help the Tableau brand.

0:05What do I mean by that?

0:07Well

0:08I think there are four problems that Tableau Public creates for the Tableau brand, and they're they're kind of related, but they're also very separate problems.

0:18And they're largely a result of the heritage of Tableau throughout the years and essentially Tableau Public morphing into something very different today.

0:27compared to how it was when it launched.

0:29And that's evolved over time and I think it's kind of gotten lost in the wind.

0:33So let me explain.

0:34When we talk about Tableau, I think people typically

0:38Think of one thing.

0:39If I just go to a diagram and let me just go to this diagram here.

0:43When we talk about Tableau, we talk about Tableau Desktop.

0:47When you think of Power BI, you're thinking of Power BI desktop.

0:50When you think of Altrix, you're thinking of Altrix Designer.

0:53Rarely do you think of the platform, rarely do you think of a specific sort of component like Tableau Prep.

1:01When you hear Tableau, even if you go to the Tableau homepage, you'll see the visualizations.

1:06And so people immediately think, ah, when I hear Tableau, I'm thinking about the product that I use to build the visualizations.

1:12So that is inherently desktop

1:15Now, there is a lot more to Tableau than that.

1:18In fact, if I go to the Tableau pricing page, you'll see that when you go and try and price up Tableau, there's actually a lot more to it than you would expect.

1:27There's Tableau Cloud, there's Tableau Standard.

1:29which is a license, it's super confusing.

1:32And if I just go back one page and I actually go back here to the pricing, you'll see that with a single creator license you actually get access to Tableau Desktop, Tableau Prep Builder

1:42a creator license and a Tableau Cloud or Tableau server with advanced management data management setup.

1:49There's a lot crammed into that one tiny little license

1:53But again, most people just think of Tableau Desktop as part of that offering.

1:58And so when you go to do your pricing, let's just go forward to the pricing page we are on.

2:03I think it remembers your details.

2:05If you're just trying to buy one creator license, then it's roughly around $900 for the year.

2:11You can't pay in months and you have to, it's per user per month built annually.

2:15It allows you to compare it to other BI tools more easily.

2:18But you can't just buy one if you're in a team.

2:21You typically have to buy at least three because you've got the one developer, you've got a backup license in case someone else needs to develop, and then you've got the administrator who typically

2:29would need a creator license.

2:30There is another license that doesn't mean they have to get a creator license.

2:34You can get an admin explorer, but nonetheless you typically need at least three creators really for it to work.

2:40And then you'll have some explorers and then you'll have another mix.

2:42So here I've gone for a team of roughly 20 people, three developers, four explorers, and the rest are just consumers.

2:48And there's a bunch of other things that you can you can bundle on.

2:51But this is sort of getting beside the point.

2:53My point here is nowhere here are you given the option of Tableau Public.

2:59And that's a little bit strange because Tableau Public actually carries a lot of the value of Tableau Desktop.

3:06It's just missing a couple of things and actually for a lot of use cases, for a lot of people just wanting to try the product, it's actually good enough

3:14Right, so if I go to Tableau Public here, you'll see that the thing it lacks is the ability to connect to databases.

3:20That's not there.

3:21You can connect to files.

3:22You can save locally.

3:23That's a recent change that was made, and I've done a video about that.

3:26And you don't need to save to public to get that to work.

3:29You don't even need to register for Salesforce for that to work.

3:32So you can go ahead, go in there, download Tableau Public Desktop Edition, and you can do all of this really easily on your machine.

3:40To get the ability to connect to data sources, to get the ability to use Tableau Prep, and to get access to the platform, the additional uplift from that free price for Tableau Public is

3:51Drum roll, $900.

3:53Right?

3:54And so it creates a bit of a confusion from a pricing perspective, because what Tableau is really saying is that

4:00To connect to databases and to get access to the rest of the platform, you need to pay $900.

4:06And all of that wonderful innovation inside of Tableau Desktop, we're just going to give that to you for free

4:11So it it in my honest opinion, you put that side by side, you go, wait, wait a minute, that that doesn't make sense.

4:18And actually asked, you know, people

4:20Um a question on LinkedIn.

4:22I said, hey, where do you place the value in the Tableau ecosystem?

4:24And this was a very uh unscientific poll

4:27And a lot of people put the value in much of what you get inside of Tableau Desktop.

4:32The second option, fast, efficient development.

4:35That's mostly Tableau Desktop.

4:36It's a little bit of Tableau Prep, but again, no one really thinks about Tableau Prep when they're thinking Tableau.

4:41They're really talking about desktop.

4:43Fast, efficient development, 34% of what most people think about Tableau goes in there.

4:48Beautiful, engaging visuals.

4:49I'll come to this point in a second.

4:5020%

4:51Robust business functionality that you could say is spread across desktop and the platform and server, so that makes a lot of sense.

4:58User-friendly interface, again, that can be spread across the rest of the platform.

5:02So really

5:02The exclusive thing here that is pinned to desktop, which you also get in Tableau Public for free, is fast, efficient development.

5:09You can develop with just a flat file and

5:12build what you need to and then share it as a screenshot as a PDF or even the file itself for someone to open and consume.

5:19So that's number one.

5:20It creates it creates this sort of massive problem with pricing.

5:23The other thing is it creates confusion of what exactly is Tableau.

5:27Because when you go to uh Tableau Public

5:31homepage um I actually can't find where it is here you go when you go to the Tableau Public homepage you land here and you see this Viz Gallery and actually when I see Tableau Public in my feed it's normally not even um

5:42uh what we see here on the viz feed.

5:44If we go to the tablet homepage and we actually just go down, you'll see that it's typically a split between, hey

5:50Here's what Tableau Next is, and then here's something from Tableau Public visit the day.

5:54Here's what Tableau Next is, Agent Force, here's what Tableau Public.

5:58It's a very sort of like um

6:00balanced sort of thing to keep the feed nice and engaging, but every so often pepper in the stuff that they know gets a little less engagement and is a little bit harder to to get the community excited about uh in here

6:14You see something like this.

6:15Let's just take this as a simple example by Valerie.

6:18And this is actually really well designed.

6:20It's really beautiful.

6:21But here's the thing.

6:22To build this, to make it this good, to make it this well formatted, this doesn't come out of the box.

6:28It actually takes quite a bit of effort, even for something as basic as this, to get it to look this good.

6:34And you get this

6:36What I'm gonna say confusion about what exactly Tableau is.

6:40Is it this thing that you see here on Tableau Public, this incredibly creative, artisanal?

6:46uh like data viz visual exploratory kind of um thing that allows people to build really custom things like this out of the box or

6:58Is it a business intelligence tool where actually this would be nice if it was out of the box, but in actual fact to get to this, you have to do a lot more work.

7:06And I would argue that in today's world in analytics

7:09There are tools that make this kind of stuff much, much easier out of the box.

7:14And maybe this is where Tableau Next is striving to reach, but it's not where Tableau is today

7:18And so the second challenge is it creates a bit of confusion about what exactly is Tableau?

7:23What is it supposed to be?

7:24Is it for creating beautiful charts and whatever?

7:27And actually a lot of the stuff that you'll see here

7:29You can argue from a viz best practice doesn't lend itself well to business context, right?

7:34It doesn't, it's not, they're not things that you're going to want to build.

7:37Um, it's more of a place for expression.

7:39There are techniques, there are good things to learn from this, but

7:42There is a real sort of um challenge and it creates this gap between you know the I call it the inspiration versus reality gap.

7:49I come here to look at this basic stuff the minute I have to try and build it at work

7:54Actually, the modern analysts shouldn't be trying to spend hours creating rounded corners.

8:00The modern analysts shouldn't be trying to spend hours

8:03building infographics.

8:05They should really be pushing for insight and in business intelligence as it were, right?

8:10And when you open any one of these, you realize even something as beautiful as this by Tanya here

8:15When you look at something like this, it looks beautiful.

8:18It feels easy to do.

8:20And if you've ever done this, you go into the Viz, you are you are able to download

8:26The workbook, you open it up and then you get in there and it's like, whoa, okay.

8:30Um I've got lots of sheets here and there, or I've got a really complicated formula with a trellis chart, and that formula has been documented by one of the cans in a blog, which takes you 20 minutes to

8:41read and suddenly that promise that sort of bit of inspiration that I got just is no longer there right this does it I get I get to this um uh asset and I realize this is much much harder to do and actually

8:54I don't have half a day to waste in my day-to-day job as an analyst uh building this thing.

8:59I've actually got to build a backlog of different things and those need to be very, very well polished and you know well delivered things

9:06Like this this creates what I call a wall of complexity, right?

9:09You see these great things, you go build them and realize they're really hard, and then you go off on this like what is essentially a year-long journey to learn all these skills, to follow a video

9:18And then yes, you do maybe accomplish uh a beautiful thing, but if I'm if I'm being really honest, this isn't what analysts are supposed to be doing.

9:26And this is largely why I stopped myself

9:29Building a lot of Tableau Public Valisations because I just hit this point of realization where I was like, this isn't the job.

9:35This isn't what I'm supposed to be doing.

9:36I'm not supposed to be doing rounded corners.

9:38And this is why suddenly

9:40picked up this sort of real passion for not using hacks.

9:43I I I built everything in Tableau Public pretty much based on standard functionality.

9:48It's pretty boring if I may add.

9:50Um it's not as exciting as some of the other stuff.

9:52And I have been able to get Viz of the Day, ironically

9:55f both times about Donald Trump, first time he went for president, and then his tweets.

10:00That's so weird.

10:01Um but nonetheless um

10:05Yeah, this is just not what analysts are supposed to be focusing on.

10:08And so if I encapsulate everything, if I just go back to sort of where I started, let's just get rid of this.

10:14You know, if you if you scale up the tableau offer and you go out and you scale it up for a team of

10:19uh let's say 18 people you you end up spending $7,000 if you just want desktop on its own you get prep whether you want it or not

10:26There's no sort of halfway house where you can just get desktop and nothing else.

10:30The full version on its own.

10:33That doesn't exist.

10:34There's nothing in the middle here.

10:35That's $900, roughly $1,000 a year.

10:39And for all of that great functionality minus the ability to connect to databases, it's essentially free.

10:45And it kind of leaves you in this weird place where

10:48Like you walk away from this thinking, man, um Tableau Public gives you a thousand dollars worth of value for free and Tableau tell you nothing about it anywhere on

11:00Their landing page.

11:02If I just go to tableau.

11:04com, you will go down.

11:07There is a mention about Tableau Public right here.

11:09Create and share on Tableau Public.

11:10A very subtle mention.

11:11Interact with the Viz, go to the the Viz Gallery, go to the

11:15Viz gallery, it's here, this create, there's download, but it's very softly, softly.

11:20There is nothing right here in the pricing to say, hey, there is a free tier.

11:25If I go to hit this buy now option

11:27And I look at the licenses here, right in the middle, it's done in pounds because I'm in the UK, but right here there should be a free option that just says Tableau Desktop.

11:36no ability to connect to files and it gives you all the value, this would be an absolute stale.

11:43And I think would start to maybe add to the proposition.

11:46But at the moment it doesn't do any of that.

11:48So what on earth is it doing?

11:50It's not marketed here.

11:52When you get to it, a lot of the promise in the product.

11:55isn't actually easy to do and frankly it's not what the mod analyst should be doing in today's world.

12:01Maybe five years ago it was a USP but in today's world where you have modern tools that are very quickly figuring out how to do nice visuals in a basic way.

12:09Essentially

12:10plu following Tableau's playbook, um it's now a commodity.

12:15Like doing good charts is becoming a commodity and it you know Tableau has to step up its game, especially on the formatting front, so that ninety percent of what we do isn't formatting.

12:24I do think there's lots of interesting things happening there.

12:27If you watch the um devs on stage, you'll see some of the great AI capability around formatting.

12:31And I've I've seen incredible

12:34internal things that have not yet been public around that capability.

12:37I know it's possible, but in today's world Tableau Public puts that front and forward wherever that page is.

12:46as the key proposition of Tableau, even Iron Viz, even all the stuff you see on Viz of the Day, they're just a world away from I think the world of business intelligence, i.

12:56e.

12:57making things for insights in the business world

12:59Wait, I nearly forgot.

13:01We talked a lot about pricing.

13:03Tomorrow, I want to talk about a change that's happened in the analytics world around pricing.

13:09And it teas up Tableau Next pretty no well.

13:12And Tableau Next will be the last video that I do in this sort of series of short perspectives.

13:17But

13:17Um pricing is is is pretty hard to understand at the moment in analytics, and I want to dig into that.

13:23Tune in tomorrow to find out more.