Jul 25, 2023·edited Jul 25, 2023Liked by Benn Stancil
"Data consumption tools aren’t infrastructure; they’re productivity tools. People buy them for their user experiences as much as their technical features. Protecting that experience across the two products has to be the first priority of any acquisition like this; enhancing it has to be the second; and neatly sorting through the technical details of how to do it has to be a distant third. " -
This also lines up neatly with the idea of "business users" doing "analytics", that has been a theme in the BI space for a number of years, to varying degrees of success. But also, leading into your footnote to the Looker/Tableau effect, aside from the community aspects, I think this is a real fear in this area. Part of what make Looker/Tableau great products is their user experience; there is a certain amount of "joy" that comes with using these products, and the size/juggernaut-ish aspects of Google/Salesforce can be seen as threat to that joy. Additionally, what Google/Salesforce decides to do with the user experience in these tools in terms of the long game is still somewhat unknown. Acquisitions can tend toward absorption to the the point of no longer being recognisable for what it once was; whether that's a positive thing can certainly be argued.
As to Thoughtspot, I'd honestly really like to see them succeed, and from what I've seen so far on the outside (read - attended a few events, ran through their product training, etc.) they are doing what a lot of other products haven't been able to do up to this point. They just need to get past the "Wall of Microsoft".
Yeah, very much agree on all the experience points. There are a bunch of subtle things in products like these that are easy to miss. I think it's possible for acquisitions to actually make those things better too, but they're delicate enough that they're easy to miss, or accidentally blow away without even noticing. That's the challenge, now.
"Data consumption tools aren’t infrastructure; they’re productivity tools. People buy them for their user experiences as much as their technical features. Protecting that experience across the two products has to be the first priority of any acquisition like this; enhancing it has to be the second; and neatly sorting through the technical details of how to do it has to be a distant third. " -
This also lines up neatly with the idea of "business users" doing "analytics", that has been a theme in the BI space for a number of years, to varying degrees of success. But also, leading into your footnote to the Looker/Tableau effect, aside from the community aspects, I think this is a real fear in this area. Part of what make Looker/Tableau great products is their user experience; there is a certain amount of "joy" that comes with using these products, and the size/juggernaut-ish aspects of Google/Salesforce can be seen as threat to that joy. Additionally, what Google/Salesforce decides to do with the user experience in these tools in terms of the long game is still somewhat unknown. Acquisitions can tend toward absorption to the the point of no longer being recognisable for what it once was; whether that's a positive thing can certainly be argued.
As to Thoughtspot, I'd honestly really like to see them succeed, and from what I've seen so far on the outside (read - attended a few events, ran through their product training, etc.) they are doing what a lot of other products haven't been able to do up to this point. They just need to get past the "Wall of Microsoft".
Yeah, very much agree on all the experience points. There are a bunch of subtle things in products like these that are easy to miss. I think it's possible for acquisitions to actually make those things better too, but they're delicate enough that they're easy to miss, or accidentally blow away without even noticing. That's the challenge, now.