Charts & Graphs
I am not a coder.
And I am definitely not an engineer.
But I like to dabble in learning a bit here and there.
Almost a decade ago, I worked in a building that was also home to the original General Assembly team.
Back then, the General Assembly campus was for startup co-working, similar to WeWork today in practice but with only one location.
Then, General Assembly rebranded itself to be a for-profit tech education offering and was acquired last year for almost half-a-billion dollars.
I only paid for one after-hours evening course at General Assembly and it wasn’t to learn any programming, but instead to learn Tableau ($DATA).
It was only one class but even all that introductory material was practical knowledge.
Professionally, I never used Tableau, but it’s somehow still fun to play around with data.
As a result, Tableau has been on my radar for some time and no, I’ve never bought any stock.
But apparently, Salesforce ($CRM) had a good impression of the data visualization software to the tune of $15.7 billion:
“This is a huge deal for Salesforce as it continues to diversify beyond CRM software and into deeper layers of analytics.
The company reportedly worked hard to — but ultimately missed out on — buying LinkedIn (which Microsoft picked up instead), and while there isn’t a whole lot in common between LinkedIn and Tableau, this deal will also help Salesforce extend its engagement (and data intelligence) for the customers that Salesforce already has — something that LinkedIn would have also helped it to do.
This also looks like a move designed to help bulk up against Google’s move to buy Looker, announced last week, although I’d argue that analytics is a big enough area that all major tech companies that are courting enterprises are getting their ducks in a row in terms of squaring up to stronger strategies (and products) in this area. It’s unclear whether (and if) the two deals were made in response to each other, although it seems that Salesforce has been eyeing up Tableau for years.”
Coincidentally, I was a LinkedIn shareholder when the company got acquired by Microsoft ($MSFT).
The closing process after the announcement took about six months, but I was happy to get all cash from the deal.
Although had it been an all-stock deal, the return-to-date performance of those Microsoft shares would’ve been over +100%.
These days, when people talk about tech, they usually simplify all news coverage and vilifying to FAANG stocks.
The infighting makes me think I’m watching Captain America: Civil War (2016) all over again but with more geeks.
Stratechery has a good take on how governments may or may not know what they’re doing if they plan on going to court:
“Ultimately, when it comes to antitrust actions against tech companies in the U.S., there really isn’t nearly as much there as all of the attendant fervor would suggest. Google is absolutely vulnerable, Apple somewhat less so, and it is very hard to see any sort of case against Facebook or Amazon.
And again, this is probably a trailing indicator: Google and Apple have maximized their gains from their most important products, while Facebook and Amazon (particularly AWS) still have growth potential. I don’t think this alignment is a coincidence.
That is not to say that tech deserves no regulation: questions of privacy, for example, are something else entirely. Nor, for that matter, is antitrust irrelevant in the United States generally: concentration has increased dramatically throughout the economy.
What is driving that concentration matters, though: at the end of the day tech companies are powerful because consumers like them, not because they are the only option. Consumer welfare still matters, both in a court of law and in the court of public opinion.”
I like Salesforce and its CEO, Marc Benioff, regardless of why the latter personally bought Time Magazine last year.
Salesforce has an incredible market advantage in customer relationship management over Adobe ($ADBE), Oracle ($ORCL), and yes, Microsoft, too.
The company’s valuation of over $100 billion shouldn’t discourage outsiders from considering what possibilities may lie ahead for the team, even as a new acquisition is scrutinized here and there.
There was a day not too long ago when all the FAANGs were valued at only slightly north of $100 billion.
But those share prices never decided to slow down for reasons that we hopefully attribute to more levels of positive cash flow.
Somewhere, maybe an analyst or consultant is making a pretty chart of tech’s market cap evolution.
And he or she is possibly using Tableau.
