This is the direction most of the major players are trying to go.
I thought the same when I saw some of the visuals as well. I'd say Microsoft has the advantage in the enterprise/corporate space. Everyone uses Office already, and Power BI is included for free as add-ons to Excel since 2010. Power BI collaboration portals are also free for the equivalent of Amazon's $9 tier.
It's cool to see competition in this space. The real power isn't in building a better BI tool for BI professionals - that's pretty much a solved problem.
The problem is capturing and leveraging the business knowledge that lives in Excel spreadsheets or Google spreadsheets on business users' own drives. That's where a lot of this excitement comes in.
The Power BI is an incredible product - thanks for listing it here... unreal! Coming from SAP/BusinessObjects products which are generally overweight and expensive, Power BI nails it... Price is free, they offer a download for Windows, web app and appears to have a mobile app. Worth a try. In 5 minutes, I had a dashboard built out of exported data from our accounting system...
I thought the same when I saw some of the visuals as well. I'd say Microsoft has the advantage in the enterprise/corporate space. Everyone uses Office already, and Power BI is included for free as add-ons to Excel since 2010. Power BI collaboration portals are also free for the equivalent of Amazon's $9 tier.
It's cool to see competition in this space. The real power isn't in building a better BI tool for BI professionals - that's pretty much a solved problem.
The problem is capturing and leveraging the business knowledge that lives in Excel spreadsheets or Google spreadsheets on business users' own drives. That's where a lot of this excitement comes in.