I'm curious to see how Google handle acquiring a company which requires some fairly high touch sales. Looker is a fantastic tool, but its not something which is useful from day one, and at least currently has a high enough price tag attached to it that they involve a lot of sales engineering in getting new customers to a point where they're able to query data they care about.
I would interpret this as a sign that Thomas Kurian is trying to "enterprisify" Google Cloud by acquiring companies with high-touch enterprise sales cultures. Which runs against Google's traditional stance but is also credited as one of the reason Google Cloud has struggled to sell into big companies so far.
Yes. To date, the Google Cloud sales pitch felt like, “Super smart Googlers all use super secret awesome sauce to do Google-scale things, you should automatically buy the pale imitations we externalized* and love it without any support because it’s all just such Googley goodness.”
For instance, this is the mantra about Borg, Omega, Kubernetes and GKE, or Blaze and Bazel, or etc.: well, we have an amazing thing, we copied a bit of it for you because you’re not us, but isn’t it great? Please send any feedback to our noreply@google.com autoresponder so we never have to leave the hive.
TBC, the world is better for the stuff Google externalized! CNCF wouldn’t be what it is otherwise. But the default attitude about it is the exact opposite of how enterprises get comfort in buying.
> Looker is a fantastic tool, but its not something which is useful from day one, and at least currently has a high enough price tag attached to it that they involve a lot of sales engineering in getting new customers to a point where they're able to query data they care about.
That describes most enterprise software, so it's not a unique challenge.
And PowerBI is either free[1] or $10/month per user[2].
Having architected and implemented BI infrastructures using all three, their pricing models all tend to converge to the same ballpark once you get to a standard, fully loaded and integrated installation. But they all have different levers for their pricing sheets, so unique usage models can sometimes take advantage of that to get a substantially better deal. Licensing models that are amenable to minimal/opportunistic usage exist for Tableau and PowerBI, but Looker very deliberately prices out that usage model.
