Tableau, a glimpse of a future to come?

I have long championed the need for intelligent software to turn around basic information stored in various places (computer, PDA, smartphone, whatever) in a sundry of formats (SQL databases, XML files, Excel spreadsheets) and present it in a more meaningful, graphical representations. Being a single person with limited time to devote to such a grand goal, I have created individual solutions to data problems that I find interesting for me: MailStat and RideStat. A team of researchers from Stanford that worked just down the hall from the founders of Google have apparently taken on the larger task of taking structured database information and presenting it graphically. Their company is called Tableau and I spotted this via Slashdot and Roland Piquepaille also has some words in Is Tableau the Next Google?.

The concepts, of course, have been championed by other companies, as mentioned by Roland, but the prospects of another company rising from the research labs of Stanford has many seeing parallels with Google. Regardless, I find the concept intriguing and hope to see more of it in the future.