Tableau 4 Positioning: Between Google Maps and ESRI

I was impressed to see basically that description of a the latest version of Tableau, a data visualization application in Intelligent Enterprise. Where did Doug Henschen get that idea? From the VP of marketing:

“For the average worker or business analysts, the ‘where’ questions often aren’t complicated enough to require a GIS tool and knowledge of cartography and map layers,” says Elissa Fink, vice president of marketing. “At the other end of the spectrum, MapPoint and Google Mashups are great ways to display data, but they’re not intended for analytics. We wanted to make maps part of the analytic workflow within Tableau.”

How does that work? The article goes on:

Data elements such as city, state and country are now automatically recognized as mappable dimensions, and users can also assign geospatial rules to selected dimensions.

I saw the PR on the new release last week (I’d never heard of the company) and visited the site but could quite get at what this app was about. The “new features” page highlights the limitation of more and less technical solutions:

Most solutions for mapping require technical knowledge that limits the use of maps in visual analysis. Or maps are displays like “mashups” which require programming skills and use map images designed for navigation, not analysis. Tableau 4.0 integrates of maps as another view type that rapidly answers questions about data.

Looking at the website, my sense is this another stab at “GIS is too complex, but we make it easy, but don’t forget analytics.” Oh, and I learned about the embedded mapping tools: “you don’t have to know a latitude from a longitude.”