Things were looking bad for Salesforce's Tableau
Tableau's evolution under Salesforce leaves longtime partners and DataFam veterans questioning whether the company they loved still exists
Things were looking bad for Tableau CEO Ryan Aytay, Tableau, and the DataFam.
A longtime Tableau reseller I know from Tableau’s early years said of Aytay, “He’s trying. But he doesn’t know how.” Things got worse from there, in particular about the Salesforce sales operation’s management of legacy Tableau accounts.
The reseller was Dan Murray, director of strategic innovation at the analytics consultancy InterWorks — which was Tableau’s first reseller. He had recognized Tableau’s potential soon after its launch in 2008, and had led InterWorks’s devotion for the product ever since. Until this year.
The new, Salesforce managers of Tableau sales have declined to honor the longstanding pricing agreement. Without that incentive, said Dan, InterWorks has discontinued its booths at conferences. “There was no incentive whatsoever to even show up. … We sent 20 people, but we didn't have a booth for the first time ever. So we saved $200,000 and got just as many leads.”
Meanwhile, his Tableau customers now call to complain to him about the Salesforce sales regime. “They hate them. They hate them.”
Though Dan had been optimistic about Aytay’s leadership initially, he’s now doubtful. “The problem is he comes from Salesforce, which is a dialing-for-dollars sales organization.” They focus on transactions instead of long-term relationships, which Tableau valued.
For Dan, and so many others from the early days of Tableau, the look back is wistful.
“I was always more interested in building things that were cool and continuing to do that forever because it's fun,” he said. “When you go through struggles with people on a team, and it's a difficult period, and you pull together, and you make it happen, something good comes out. You never forget the relationship.”
Early Tableau, he said, “was just a weird band of people. Like, really interesting people.” This was unlike most other tech companies, he said, which tend to attract a certain type. “It was a wide range of people.”
I wrote a post in 2012 headlined “The future of BI in two words,” I described what I saw in Tableau:
Metaphorically speaking, Tableau is West Coast. It's built for discovery by the individual. Just show up and ride on the breeze, the demos seem to say, free as a seed fairy on a meadow. The inevitable mistakes of discovery are quickly undone and forgotten. Create the most dazzling visualizations — "vizzes" — thanks to built-in best practices that nudge you toward beauty and punch. One of the most attractive aspects is users' effervescence. They seem to be riding on the wind and solving business problems all at once. Their rapture sweeps me away every time I'm near it.
The other “word” was QlikView (now Qlik). By contrast, it was East Coast, which was “more like a manicured garden than Tableau's unfenced field of daisies” — to which an offended chief marketing officer Elissa Fink said, “Aw, c’mon Ted!” I made it up to her.
One vintage member of early Tableau actually made a happy leap into the Salesforce era. Francois Ajenstat was Tableau’s chief product officer and then glided into the same role under Salesforce. There, he worked happily for three years. (He left in late 2023 to become chief product officer at Amplitude.)
Francois’s view contrasts starkly from Dan’s. “I think it's like people are trying to live a little bit in the past,” he said, “versus what [Tableau] could be.”
“It's still the best goddamn exploration and analytics solution on the market. Nothing else comes close. It is pretty incredible that after more than 20 years, it's still like the best solution out there in the marketplace for what it does well.”
So much has changed since Tableau’s inception, he said. “There was no cloud, no mobile, no social, no generative AI. No Databricks, Snowflake, or Bitcoin.
“We all know and love Tableau,” Francois said, “but it was born in a very different era.” Tableau was a revolution, he said, “and it created a movement.”
As always happens with movements that endure, Tableau evolved. At every phase, some people who’d been there early didn’t like the next phase. “They moved on. And that's okay. And when a big event like Salesforce happens, there's some people who just said, ‘F you,’ and stormed out."
Tableau can't just stand in place, he points out. “I don't think they want Tableau to turn into Teradata, which missed the cloud. There's a real risk to that."
" I worked with and for Ryan for three years and I really liked Ryan,” he said. “Ryan is genuine. He cares deeply, and he is trying to do the right thing... He owns Tableau and he cares deeply about the community and he wants to make it right."
I imagine that Francois is correct. Things actually look fine for Aytay, for Tableau, and the new DataFam generation. The old DataFam, including Francois himself, Dan Murray, and me, we’re moving on.