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Google just threw a wrench into one of Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella's favorite projects
(AP)
Google CEO Sundar Pichai.
In March, Google announced Data Studio 360, a product to help its business customers make charts, graphs, and other visualizations of their data.
This week, Google announced a free version of Data Studio 360 for "individuals and small teams." It's a little shift that could shake up the market in a big way.
"One of the fundamental ideas behind Data Studio is that data should be easily accessible to anyone in an organization. We believe that as more people have access to data, better decisions will be made," writes Google in a blog entry.
That's a similar central philosophy to Microsoft's Power BI product.
The first product Microsoft released after Satya Nadella took over as CEO was Power BI, which lets normal business people make sense of floods of data without requiring a tech specialist. He has since called it the "next giant leap" in business intelligence.
Google is also competing against a slew of smaller companies like Tableau, Domo, and Tidemark, which offer free tools, as well.
Data Studio 360 is mainly designed to integrate with Google services, including the Google Sheets spreadsheet tool, Google Analytics, and Google AdWords, so you can analyze all of your Google-stored business data. It also integrates with Google BigQuery, its popular big-data analysis tool in the cloud.
(Google)
A data-visualization dashboard made in Google Data Suite 360.
While those Google services are very popular, that still leaves some room to grow. The other players in the space have established connections to all kinds of business apps.
That said, Tableau especially has been struggling to keep Wall Street's confidence, despite beating guidance this last quarter. With Google getting into the game and offering users its considerable technical prowess for free, the pressure on existing players is likely to grow.
Here's a video showing Data Studio 360 in action:
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