Tableau Rallies After Subscription Shift, Microsoft Threat

Not long before former Amazon executive Adam Selipsky joined Tableau Software as its chief executive in 2016, the Seattle-based software company’s stock had lost half its value in a single day on worries that Microsoft was preparing to eat its lunch with a cheaper product.  

Investors got another scare after Mr. Selipsky took over when he told them Tableau—which makes tools for visualizing data in charts and graphs—planned to move most of its business to subscriptions from traditional software sales, a shift that would hurt profits in the near term. Now, two and half years later, Tableau has survived the Microsoft threat, most of its software bookings come from subscriptions and its stock has more than tripled from its nadir in 2016, giving the company a market capitalization of $10.6 billion.