Mike Palmer: Google's Looker acquisition failed by locking out non-experts
Mike Palmer · Dashboards Are Dead: Sigma’s BI Revolution for Trillion-Row Data · May 1, 2025 · at 32:56
Mike Palmer is CEO of Sigma Computing. He argues that Google's acquisition of Looker failed because LookML's proprietary language restricted access to expert users.
0:00 / 0:20exact quote · 20.3s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“Google's experiment with Looker has failed, and with Looker, they built a LookML, which by the way, I would say back in 2017, it was probably the best product on the market, but they built a product for experts, and they ensured that it was going to be a product for experts, because they wrote their own language, and they had to learn that language.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Mike Palmer
Mike Palmer: Tableau acts as superficial wrapping paper for data
“And I think that Tableau is wrapping paper in Japan. You really wanted the toothbrush, but somehow what you really got was wrapping paper.”
Mike Palmer: Microsoft Fabric is a marketing rebrand of legacy software
“And I'm directly accusing Microsoft here. I think their application products are not good in their cloud products. I think fabric is a run it back strategy on office through 65, where they just provide a marketing name to some longstanding old products.”
Sigma CEO Mike Palmer says text-to-SQL AI products are a joke
“So I think these products are a joke. I don't think that they're going to succeed and we don't care about them.”
Sutter Hill's Mike Spicer funds companies despite overwhelming failure evidence
“Which is, by the way, a testament to Mike Spicer at Sutter Hill because he is, he has so much conviction in his companies that despite overwhelming evidence that the company is a total failure, he keeps investing in it.”