Thread by @QuinnyPig

Usually “I can’t use a particular cloud due to confidentiality or competitive reasons” criticism is levied at @awscloud. I have a story about the reverse.

At the Duckbill Group, we analyze giant piles of customer @awscloud billing data. This may be heresy, but @msexcel falls down at the many-gigabytes level.

One of the best in class options was @LookerData. It’s amazing!

And then Google bought them.

I want to be very clear here: I don’t suspect at all that @GCPcloud is mining customer data from Looker. That would be monstrous.

But “we send your confidential AWS billing data to Google” is optically… challenging.

So with much wailing and gnashing of teeth, we ponied up for @tableau instead. It’s the worst of Enterprisr Software Buying Experiences, but the tool itself is great.

(This also explains my constant berating of Amazon QuickSight. I WANT YOU TO BE BETTER!)

The reason I mention this is to provide a very public five figure a year datapoint that buying choices are in part dictated by competitive and reputational concerns.

While we’d theoretically have similar problems with @MSPowerBI (“Excel for Workgroups!”), Microsoft for all its flaws has a stellar reputation for responsible stewardship of customer data and would have been more acceptable to our customers.