(HN made me split my comment)

This is why the marketing pages for even the most generic products in the world almost always talk more about 'solutions'. Like, companies don't even know they need a database. They know that they need something to keep track of products. They know that they need to keep track of customers. They know that they need to keep track of resources, inventory, etc. Customers think in terms of 'screens', not the fact that these are all fairly small things built on top of very complex database software.

So you start out inventing the RDBMS or the...SAN storage fabric...durable event queue...whatever it is. But you can't sell it to companies until you explain that no, it's a customer relationship manager. No, it's a way to store all your digital assets. It's a way to capture all your customer interaction data so you can make your digital marketing more effective. It takes an enormous amount of work to go from 'well-engineered technical solution to a general problem' to 'thing people will buy'. Imho, this was one of Marc Benioff's most brilliant moves: the company is called salesforce dot com. It's for your salesforce! If you have a salesforce, get this. We make CRM. Salesforce, of course, is really just a little lego box of hosted database configurators and form-builders, search engines, form hosts, etc. It's kind of like a cloud Microsoft Access that runs at larger scale, but that product would've fallen flat on its face (in fact it has, several times. the most elegant of these was probably Dabble DB) because no one wants a cloud-hosted form-builder + a database. They want a CRM system you don't have to install. They want to see the pipeline view, the contact view, etc. _on the website_. Not a video presentation where a guy at StrangeLoop shows how easy it is to make a Todo List.

It's an old dumb airport business book cliche to say "customers don't want drills, they want holes." These tools tend to be more like trying to sell customers a modular motor-and-battery-and-gear train set that can be used to create any tool: a drill, a saw, a sander..._they're all just battery-driven small motors with different gearing and tool-holders!_

So, the really messed up and interesting part is that the difference in the sort of 'consumer surplus' if you will between "cloud-hosted form-builder + database" and "cloud-hosted form-builder + database + we already made the contact-entry form and the pipeline view" IS FRIGGIN HUGE. No one will pay for the cloud-hostable database + form-builder. Or within epsilon of no one. That's also 99.9999% of the work. TONS of people will pay for the same thing with the contact form and the pipeline view ("the CRM system").

This is known as "The Software Industry". It's a completely messed up place! You see this all the time on HackerNews: commentors complaining that YC/A16Z keep investing in "things that are just skins on a database" instead of "hard tech". It's because no one pays for hard tech anymore. Operating systems are not a business. For decades, they were a multibillion dollar industry, but now they exist only as a loss-leader. Oracle survives because they sell the forms on top of the database (Peopleware, etc). HDFS, Kafka, HAProxy, Hadoop, Hive, Spark, Linux, Memcached, are all free. MIXPANEL costs tons of money.

The venture capital industry essentially exists now to exploit this huge bizarre situation: it costs a very small amount of money to see if you can add the last 5% to the collective pile of software that's free to make a very large amount of money. It wasn't always like this, but it is now. People will point to cleantech funds and health care investments, etc. but as of now, the total return on all invested VC with IT subtracted out is 0. The entrepreneur's tendency is to want to build the free 95%, but the economic return is in the last 5% you can charge for.

Tableau is also very interesting. I'm curious how people are using it in practice. In my experience, there are generally tons and tons of business people who say things like "i want to see the X and Y correlation blah blah blah which customer bought this that also went to one of our events..." and they have no ability to answer these questions. So they pay Business Objects Microstrategy or some big BI vendor to build a 'business intelligence' system...70% of the cost is consulting...and they end up with a handful of fixed reports and no ad-hoc querying.

Then they hire some sort of programmer-with-a-different-title to write reports.

Alternatively, they keep dumping the data into Excel and some clever 'non-technical' person muddles through using macros to clean it up, some combination of index/match/offset to prepare it, and pivot tables to make the final reports.

My curiosity about tableau is, in actual, real-world deployments, how ad-hoc are people's queries really? Also, how do they handle what used to be called ETL? It seems like an ongoing and challenging problem. It would be relatively easy to build a friendly-if-limited query and visualization platform on top of perfect data, but there is no perfect data in the world. In my experience, getting to the point where you can do ad-hoc queries on transactional business data means 90% of your resources will have been spent on ETL-ish problems, and about 10% on the 'fun part'.

But Tableau is obviously killing it so they must have found some magic combination of the right amount of query flexibility and manageable data...management. I haven't like, talked to their sales people or used the product in many years though so I'm not super familiar with where it is now.

OK LONGEST COMMENT IN THE WORLD OVER NOW!!!