<story><title>Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2019/06/10/salesforce-is-buying-data-visualization-company-tableau-for-15-7b-in-all-stock-deal/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dvdhsu</author><text>As an engineer, this has really fascinated me. Tableau, Salesforce, Excel, etc. were things that never made a significant amount of sense to me. I thought mostly of Salesforce as a CRUD app (which it is!), Tableau as d3 with nicer ergonomics, and Excel as... well... something I never understood.&lt;p&gt;If this is something you guys are interested in, I started a company called Retool (&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;tryretool.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;tryretool.com&lt;/a&gt;) that is essentially Excel for developers. Imagine if every Excel cell — instead of being a cell — were instead a React component. So you drag and drop these components around, and you can connect them to any back-end datasource (postgres, APIs, etc.). So you could drag on a table and have it pull data from `select * from users` from postgres, and then drag on a button and have it `POST` the selected row back to your API, in order to ban a particular user. The goal is to let end users build CRUD apps (like Salesforce) around their existing datasources quickly.&lt;p&gt;If you guys have any feedback... I&amp;#x27;d really appreciate it. We&amp;#x27;re just starting out, and really curious to get any feedback from developers. Thanks!</text></item><item><author>anonu</author><text>One thing I&amp;#x27;ve had to remind myself of - coming from a CS&amp;#x2F;Engineering background similar to most folks on HN (I&amp;#x27;m guessing) - is that there are 2 types of people: Those who program and those who don&amp;#x27;t.&lt;p&gt;To me, Salesforce looks like a big shared Excel file with a bunch of sheets. Tableau... well I can do the same thing with some scripts or spin up a web server.&lt;p&gt;To others, this tech is just magical. Pay the money, do the integration and it just works... And clearly people will pay a lot of money for things that &amp;quot;just work&amp;quot;.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>scarejunba</author><text>When I looked into this a few months ago, your pricing didn’t make sense to me. You’re saving developer time, but charging on user time. So I’ve got 800 people in this org and I could either pay a shit ton to use retool or just build it from scratch. The difference between both of these is my time so it makes sense I’d pay you for that.&lt;p&gt;That made it not viable for me. Building from scratch was way cheaper with Upwork. Anyway, Product was cool.</text></comment>
<story><title>Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2019/06/10/salesforce-is-buying-data-visualization-company-tableau-for-15-7b-in-all-stock-deal/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dvdhsu</author><text>As an engineer, this has really fascinated me. Tableau, Salesforce, Excel, etc. were things that never made a significant amount of sense to me. I thought mostly of Salesforce as a CRUD app (which it is!), Tableau as d3 with nicer ergonomics, and Excel as... well... something I never understood.&lt;p&gt;If this is something you guys are interested in, I started a company called Retool (&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;tryretool.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;tryretool.com&lt;/a&gt;) that is essentially Excel for developers. Imagine if every Excel cell — instead of being a cell — were instead a React component. So you drag and drop these components around, and you can connect them to any back-end datasource (postgres, APIs, etc.). So you could drag on a table and have it pull data from `select * from users` from postgres, and then drag on a button and have it `POST` the selected row back to your API, in order to ban a particular user. The goal is to let end users build CRUD apps (like Salesforce) around their existing datasources quickly.&lt;p&gt;If you guys have any feedback... I&amp;#x27;d really appreciate it. We&amp;#x27;re just starting out, and really curious to get any feedback from developers. Thanks!</text></item><item><author>anonu</author><text>One thing I&amp;#x27;ve had to remind myself of - coming from a CS&amp;#x2F;Engineering background similar to most folks on HN (I&amp;#x27;m guessing) - is that there are 2 types of people: Those who program and those who don&amp;#x27;t.&lt;p&gt;To me, Salesforce looks like a big shared Excel file with a bunch of sheets. Tableau... well I can do the same thing with some scripts or spin up a web server.&lt;p&gt;To others, this tech is just magical. Pay the money, do the integration and it just works... And clearly people will pay a lot of money for things that &amp;quot;just work&amp;quot;.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>enlyth</author><text>I would have to delve deeper to give actually useful feedback, but I wanted to say from a presentational point of view, it looks great, well done for putting something like this together</text></comment>