BI is dead

https://benn.substack.com/p/bi-is-dead

If you have both Looker and Tableau, which one is your BI tool? My blunt answer is Tableau. You answer your questions in Tableau; BI tools are, above all, where questions get answered. Looker, in this realigned world, is squarely in the transformation layer—and specifically, part of the metrics layer. As I see it, this integration is the start of Looker’s retreat from fighting with visualization and exploration tools like Tableau, and an opening salvo in its campaign against metrics tools like Transform, Supergrain, Trace, and Metriql.

My belief has long been that consolidation under Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Salesforce is the most likely outcome. These companies, sitting on nearly $400 billion in cash, aren’t going to sit on the sidelines of, according to Andreessen Horowitz’s Martin Casado, a trillion dollar data market. They’ve already built enormous businesses on top of collections of cloud computing services; it seems natural for them to do the same on data services.

Over the last couple years, Google (and specifically GCP) has been apparently moving in this direction. Google built BigQuery for data storage, Data Studio for visualization, and Colab for advanced analytics; they acquired Alooma for ETL, Dataform for transformation, and Looker for governance and metric calculation. All the pieces for the Google Modern Data Experience™ are there, provided that they can make them all work together.