Microstrategy Desktop Now Available as a Free Application

In an interesting development, Microstrategy has decided to make its once-flagship Desktop application free of charge, without limitation.

For those unfamiliar, Microstrategy is a Business Intelligence tool, along the same lines as Tableau, Qlik et al. They’ve struggled to maintain market share as the BI space has grown, so providing their standalone desktop software for free will be a good way for them to capture new customers who will hopefully grow from using the free tool to purchasing their enterprises cloud and sharing platforms.

It will be interesting to see if the market follow’s suit. Of course, Microsoft’s PowerBI is already free, and only a modest cost for the full ‘Pro’ version. Could this really begin to put pressure of Tableau in particular?

At a personal level, I have some experience with Microstrategy, and it was never a tool I felt ‘at home’ with – it was counter-intuitive and difficult to do what felt like rather simple tasks. But that was a number of years ago – perhaps it’s time to give it another go!

You can download Microstrategy from here