Pivot (from Microsoft) | Hacker News Reader

Pivot (from Microsoft)

getpivot.com

46 pointsvijayr57 comments

For those without Silverlight here is a video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZuFUZpEZ-A

BTW it's crystal clear also on YouTube (HD), so I suppose it's simply a well made video, not some special Silverlight codec.

I would recommend watching this instead of waiting for your browser to unfreeze after 20 seconds.

This has the potential to be the way we see search results in the future, imagine when you search it creates a collection automatically out of the results and you can filter through it visually like that... We still need more computing power but Moore's Law will take care of that over the next decade.

With the anti-MSFT bias, don't hold it against their research teams. They have great people. You can disagree with their commercialization strategy but that isn't coming from the technologists.

The difference between good and great is that great works everywhere.

It's definitely an interesting area, lots of people have datasets without any real ability to analyze them. Even something basic like creating a pivot table is outside the capabilities of your average excel user.

So if someone (Microsoft or otherwise) can figure out a way of making that easy to do, then there's a huge amount of value in that.

One has to wonder how the reaction would differ if the headline said "Pivot (from Google)"

At least, Google's thing would work when I clicked the link. For this one I have to install some latest Microsoft browser-disruption technology.

I even had Silverlight installed (version 2.0), but I needed to upgrade to 3.0, by downloading Silverlight.exe, going through a traditional installer, restarting the browser only to find out that it's only a boring marketing video with talking heads.

I expected that I could at least try out some demo online.

Do you have a Flash player installed? If so, what's the difference between Adobe's browser-disruption technology and Microsoft's?

I'd agree that content requiring either is almost universally annoying, but at some point you have to compromise if you want to investigate something that may be worthwhile/interesting/worth ridiculing.

It's not just Silverlight - I installed that, then tried to access the demo URLs and was told I needed to install Pivot as well. Which isn't available for the Mac.

http://content.getpivot.com/Collections/dogbreeds/dogbreeds....

Why would expect it to be available for the ma?. The headline clearly said its from Microsoft.

are you aware that word, excel, powerpoint, and yes, even silverlight are all available for the mac?

Although you are right, they are, they almost certainly weren't when they first came out.

Excel, the first GUI-based Word and Powerpoint were out for the Mac first in mid-to-late 1980's. Windows wasn't ready for them. Multiplan and the original Word were DOS apps.

I know it's irrelevant to this Post, just a historical note. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_PowerPoint http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Excel http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Word

yep. it's hard to believe now, but microsoft was one of the early champions of the mac. i don't know if it's still true, but at one time, microsoft's macbu employed more mac programmers than apple itself.

Oh wow, thanks. I had no idea.

I had it, but you reminded me to uninstall it (thanks!). I only used it rarely (Google Analytics charts and non-YouTube flash videos), and most of the time it was blocked by ClickToFlash.

There's no difference except that Mac OS X already comes with Flash.

Yeah, right, that Twitter Go example that you did -- you didn't have to download and install Google Go or read its documentation to get started. So much for "google's thing would work when I click the link"...

Talk about biased.

First off, thanks for remembering that I wrote that tiny Go thing -- I didn't expect it :)

So much for "google's thing would work when I click the link"

The difference is that Go didn't supposed to work in browser -- it's a compiler, desktop software, so I downloaded it. It didn't install any plugins for my browser. I don't like browser plugins.

His twitter go example wasn't supposed to run in the browser.

My point is that for stuff coming from G or A people here are ready to walk an extra mile. If stuff is coming from M -- that's it, end of journey right on the headline.

you're aware that most of us didn't get that bias by accident, right? microsoft has a long, LONG history of being not a good company to rely on or work with. therefore, anything coming from them has to be especially compelling before people here are going to get excited about it.

I'd say Microsoft's history is quite the opposite. The oft cited example is that Visicalc, from the 80's still works! I'd say that's a pretty reliable platform. How many apple products from the 80's run on Leopard?

And on the other side, lots of google products are already defunct and they aren't even half M's age.

You define "reliable" as "can run Visicalc". I am not sure this is a good one.

For me, reliable is "works every time the way I expect it to work". According to this, Windows is pretty reliable. The trick is in my expectations.

how about asking the guys at stac electronics how reliable they think windows is! that's the kind of thing i'm talking about.

Oh, please. It's not A that have completely unpredictable app store approval process, or not G that may release a free version of your beloved startup anytime they feel the urge to get more eyeballs for their properties. It's definitely more reliable than M, yeah.

It's the end of journey when you see that you have to disrupt the stability of one of your primary tools (browser) (and then learn that it doesn't work on your OS).

And yes, I hate Silverlight.

Have you tried it to make a conclusion that it will disrupt something? No, you just "hate" it. That's plain old bias.

PS. It's actually funny to see that kind of bias coming from the person who's getting (or at least WAS getting) most of their income from M's platform. ;)

Have you tried it to make a conclusion that it will disrupt something? No, you just "hate" it. That's plain old bias.

Yes, I had it installed for some time. I don't remember the exact problems I had with it, but there were problems.

As for bias, I think I have the normal level of it wrt Microsoft. Everyone have it. (Oh, and you should note that I competed with MS. Add this to your bias-detector.)

Anyway, why we're discussing me and my bias? Re-read my original post. Any objections? State them, and please exclude me from the picture, and stop trolling.

We're discussing bias because it's always the case whenever someone's new stuff is being discussed on HN: it's very interesting to see how people's opinion changes by mere knowledge of where that new stuff is coming from.

I had a similar thought. Once I saw that it required Silverlight there was no point in learning more.

Thank you for sharing your well-researched insightful opinion that clearly reflects many decades of experience in the industry. It's exactly for comments like this I come to Hacker News every day, I feel like I learn new things all the time.

(Sorry for the rant)

Taking issue with the requirements is a perfectly legitimate technical complaint and you see lots of people complain when some new web application is flash-only.

There's some hyper-sensitivity going on here today.

Hyper-reactions are always telling. My bet is that these people feel somewhat threatened. The fact some Microsoft users and enthusiasts feel that way here is, itself, very interesting.

Microsoft doesn't give two shits about emerging web standards or cross-platform compatibility. it's like they have their fingers in their collective ears going "LA LA LA I can't hear you"

Or "Pivot (from Apple)" then everyone would start freaking out.

So they are planning to supply software for screens displayed in hollywood movies? Like you know, images flying across the screen, zooming in and out and so on? :)

You have to find something for all those cores, CPU and GPU, you have in your computer.

The one thing that I find impressive is the look of the video in SilverLight. The video is crystal clear and no artifacts.

As far as I know, it’s using the same H.264 codec that is also used by many Flash videos. The “crystal” clarity comes from higher resolution and less compression, and you could do the same thing with Flash, Quicktime, &c.

That maybe true, but everytime I see a video on silver light it always better than flash videos. It maybe that the users of silverlight understand; video, lighting, sound and encoding better, or just care more about what it looks like.

Or don’t have as many people watching, and can afford the bandwidth?

It was great using Silverlight to watch online video during the Olympics.

a) not everyone can install a native app or plugin. I expect web apps to work everywhere, on any device.

b) not everyone uses or will use a traditional pc.

plus more bandwidth.

It's an interesting piece of software. I look at massive amounts of data all day and I'm constantly trying to glean out features of the dataset. Having a visual tool that can instantly represent the dataset in various forms would be indispensable. Right now I have to do a lot of custom visualization work in Matlab, which is great on a case by case basis. I would deeply consider something like Pivot if it can generalize whatever I'm throwing at it. But my two main concerns:

1) This being a MS technology, is it going to have the unnecessary overhead like other MS products (Excel, Vista, etc)

2) Are these "collections" free? Can we import our own? It seems like if the data was already pre-processed, then that wouldn't be the case.

You can make your own collections, it's relatively easy unless you have 100k+ items, then you have to write some custom server software

tl;dr

silverlight deepzoom (aka seadragon) from files, db and the web.

citation: http://www.getpivot.com/images/collections/image012.png

Yep - DeepZoom a PivotTable of Wikipedia

It looks interesting just from the few mins. of video, but I'd have to play with it to make a more informed decision as to it's usefulness. Unfortunately it's only invite only beta.

I'd like to know how their collections are sorted. I think the hard problem in all this is, given a vast data set, find the parameters that give the optimal organizational scheme. But all the pretty transitions are a nice touch :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluster_analysis

It's an interesting visualisation technology - but I'm yet to be persuaded that it's not just a neat toy.

I wanted to try it out but after installing SilverLight on my Mac the Download button gives me a .MSI installer that tries to open in VMWare. Good work Microsoft, as always.

Interesting interface, but they call data sets of "hundreds of thousands - maybe even millions" items "massive". Ridiculous.

It's all in context. That's a "massive" amount of data for one human to swim in in any reasonable level of depth.

They seem to be suggesting that they 'invented' collections, bizarre.

That's all great, but imagine how much self-evident patents were probably filed. Like that sparklines-in-a-document patent.

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