I've never seen MicroStrategy software in the wild
I find something peculiar about MicroStrategy.
- I've heard about this company since the late nineties.
However:
- I've never seen their software in the wild. I've been around lots of enterprise environments.
- they have an official YouTube channel where they provide tutorials for using their software. The average view count for their videos seems to be about 60 (sixty) per tutorial video. (Just one of many heuristics I use to gauge the popularity of software).
- they seem to have no trial-ware software that any person who might be curious can download and take for a spin.
Apparently, they're similar to Tableau, except they've been around since before Tableau. (Interesting because I was involved in a Data Visualization implementation project, and in discussions Tableau came up, and so did various FOSS alternatives, but MicroStrategy never came up. We went with Tableau and Orange Data Mining, FWIW)
Apparently they're doing pretty well because they have a market cap of 3 billion (well below what Tableau sold for, but still), and had a half a billion in cash before the CEO Saylor bought bitcoin with it (I do admire Saylor, he sounds brilliant in podcasts).
Two questions:
1) Have you seen their software in the wild? Who uses it?
2) Any reason you can think of why an over 20 year old, successful, software company with half a billion cash in the bank has two-digit view counts on official tutorial videos on its YouTube channel? (Pure, irresponsible speculation and innuendo on my part: I've heard of companies that are fronts for 3-letter government departments. That they have ghost customers who don't actually exist. That the reason these companies exist is to help the 3-letter govt dept achieve something it can't otherwise achieve within the govt. operating framework.)