The article on ZDNet Salesforce’s $15.7 billion Tableau acquisition: Everything you need to know
One way or the other FMI will work with Salesforce.
Eh ben! Suis estomaquée.
I still don’t understand the significance of how this purchase relates to FMI
There is a connector for Tableau.
At 1-more-thing and Beeswax (if i’m not mistaken) and a few other FBA firms, Tableau is part of the comprehensive FileMaker development services. We already deal with Tableau. Now we’re going to have to deal with SalesForces. It’s evoking some 90210 memories here.
I wasn’t a big fan of the Tableau integration in the FileMaker demos I saw, but I’m also not usually a fan of large corporate purchases of smaller niche services. Translation: I do not plan on doing anything with Tableau for the foreseeable future. 
Agreed, this does not in any particular way impact our FM functionality. Not in the short term. And in the long term … as John Maynard Keynes states “In the long term we’re all dead”.
These kinds of acquisitions are going happen. As consultants we need to be able to react. The more tools we have in our tool belt the better we can. Unless SF significantly changes the way Tableau can be interacted with, it won’t affect the existing deployments much.
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It's a thing. It has been for a while now. And it's not bad to have to deal with it. It is not going to eat you up. SF is a great platform but just like the FM platform it has its limitations. Just like the FM platform, it is a premium platform. Meaning it comes at a price. It is not an automatic "I am going to swallow you up" competitor to what we do. You are not defenseless to it.
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One of the things that the writing medium doesn’t do always really well is to convey the non verbal.
Before the SalesForce community platform, I did not know SalesForces. And from my experience on the platform used for the forum, I was not really impressed (didn’t go to find out what kind of player it was). I bagged it with Microsoft Dynamics Great Plains : big elephant costly impossible to customize locally by sme and sacrificing ergonomy to have a certain image. (You can tell my experience with GP was pretty bad as well).
I recently discovered that one of my favorite app for surveys (FormAssembly) was bought by SalesForce. I had not used it since 2011. When I saw it recently, it looked overstuffed. Probably a lot more powerful and with tons of features but probably not as intuitive and easy to use as it was. And incredibly more expensive.
So reading the news above, I got a sense of size. I mean to be able to buy Tableau for 15.7B.
When I considered buying a license for Tableau, I was shocked at the price. So following to that merger, there might be some changes in the price structure.
So I’m now wondering what the impact will be for our clients at 1-more-thing.
Also, keep in mind, it appears to be an all-stock purchase. So no real cash exchange.
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It’s occurences like this that keep people I talk to from considering FMP. I have a client who got totally burned with Visual FoxPro (who would have believed MS would ditch VFP?). They had spent over $1M on that project and the code is extremely complex. No way to replicate that code in non-OOP FMP.
The beauty of VFP (still used by many) is that it’s Object Oriented and has a simple EXE for a work group of 50 or more users with no royalty or yearly payments or other fees. So, totally free beyond the initial $500 for the software. Imagine that. VFP does require a higher programming ability than FMP, however.
Other than a SQL Server back end, this client eventually opted for an open source, n-tier, upgrade approach after considering alternatives. FMP/S was still evaluated but viewed as a risky alternative as it was totally proprietary with ever-raising prices and they did not want to get burned again (potentially).
The port to the new system was more work up front, but now it’s all gravy. 50 users or 5,000 users.
YMMV
Wim,
I’m glad to see you here on this forum!
Welcome.