> Tableau workers call themselves the #DataFam. The name has carried a double meaning, describing both a love of data and also camaraderie among family members.

Yeah... a workplace "family" is about as much of a family as a Mafia crew.

As soon as push comes to shove, someone's getting buried in the Pine Barrens.

This is unusually family-like, though: After the layoffs started last month, many past and current Tableau employees connected online to offer help and support to those affected.

I'll accept "children with abusive foster parents" as a better analogy.

I can totally see this. I'm friends with people from previous jobs where we joke out entire friendship is built around trauma bonding!

Why not #DataFarm?

The article paints a picture of a spunky tight-knit startup operating as a family, but they had a headcount of over 4000 and have enterprise-level pricing ($42/user/month for authoring) in a world were many open source alternatives exist.

Tableau's biggest competitor is PowerBI, not anything open source.

Excel (incumbent), and Looker (for anyone on Google)

Okay, but neither of those are open source...

OSS BI like Redash, Superset, Metabase, etc. Low code solutions like AppSmith.

Also retool, Budibase, glide and others

I don't think Retool and Glide are open source, but they are good alternatives to Tableau's pricing.

...in classic salesforce style...

That's wild. Tableau was THE thing in dashboards not 5 years ago.

What took over?

In my experience PowerBI seems to have had wide adoption. Not sure if it represents a better value proposition in itself or if MS were just able to integrate it with their other products which are already dominant in corporate environments.

Microsoft made PowerBI a really cheap "would you like fries with that" purchase for enterprise E3 licenses and above, and really undercut Tableau's cost (I recall it's less than half the per user price). So a lot of corporate expense management types came down with "why would we pay for 2 tools that do (mostly) the same thing", and Tableau doesn't get renewed.

Mostly PowerBI, plus a little bit of the "operational analytics" movement, which is essentially an anti-dashboarding phenomenon. Example operational analytics tools that aren't dashboards but that can be used serve a similar purpose are Get Census, Hightouch, and Grouparoo.