So could Deski have been. 
SAP BO will lag behind the in memory visualisation trend while they get the perception of BI 4 sorted out with people. There are too many people that I know that aren’t interested in upgrading, either due to Deski not being available or because BOXI3 does what they want and BI4 doesn’t give them enough reason to upgrade because they aren’t reporting over SAP BW.
We had consultants in here from BO a few years ago to build a PM dashboard. They did a decent job, but they had been in fairly regular contact with the product group regarding issues that they were running into. That should have a been a warning to us.
I think DeskI is a fantastic product. The fact that it’s virtually unchanged since 2001, yet is still so highly used, is a testament to Bernard’s vision for BI. He got it.
joepeters 
(BOB member since 2002-08-29)
IMHO the problem is that SAP has created a zoo of Frontend tools:
Xeclsius/DashboardDesign,
SAP DesignStudio,
SAP WAD,
Roadmap: Consolidate to DesignStudio in the future
SAP BEx Analyzer,
Analysis MS Office,
Roadmap: Analysis MS Office is the premium successor to BEx Analyzer
WebIntelligence,
Crystal Rpeorts 2011 (CR 2011),
Crystal Rpeorts for Enterprise 4 (CRE4),
Roadmap: Consolidate the Crystal Product line to CRE4, keep Webi
SAP Lumira/Visual Intelligence,
BusObjects Explorer
and has so far not been successful in consolidating this zoo of 10 products at all… the roadmaps are the future direction (see: service.sap.com/roadmaps ).
Deski was a great product, but it is dead. AF was just Okay IMHO and awful to setup, maintain and troubleshoot (including its own datamart…).
Andreas 
(BOB member since 2002-06-20)
Clearly I need to get out more because I love xcelsius! And compared to Performance Manager, it’s a breeze to work with…
But I don’t use it with Bobj at all. I just consume xml generated by direct database queries.
Debbie
Debbie 
(BOB member since 2005-03-01)
Unchanged virtually in 12 years. Imagine how good it could have been with 12 years of extra effort thrown at it?
Really, really good?
Nick Daniels 
(BOB member since 2002-08-15)
Nothing gets past you, does it Nick? 8)
(-:
Nick Daniels (BOB member since 2002-08-15)
So many good replies in this thread. Andreas, Mark P, joepeters… I am with you all.
Deski was and is a fantastic product. Imagine what it could be today, given what it STILL IS today! (Irreplaceable)
Bernard was a visionary and what a great tool it was. BOBJ was clearly best of breed. It is no surprise that the front end product lineup has turned into such a zoo- been to the SAP support site lately? Everything that SAP touches turns into a proprietary and unneccesarily complex bowl of spaghetti to be untangled by us all. Props to those of you who have invented 3rd party tools to help fill the gaps!
Watching a Lumira webinar yesterday, and the touting of “self service BI” fell on deaf ears with my team. Maybe one day TPTB at SAP BI will realize that their vision of self-service BI is a myth and go back to making content sourcing, transformation, and delivery a priority. Enable us, say, screen scrape from the web straight into a report; JOIN instead of UNION results from varying data sources; easily publish BI content outside of the countless SAP portals (infoview, lumira cloud, whatever) These are the types of things that are going to keep SAP BI in the race. I don’t know too many business-side analysts who have any desire to learn any new front end tools when their world is Excel, Access, and Outlook.
lotsarows 
(BOB member since 2002-10-02)
Keeping to this thread of the BEST BO developers I have ever read or requested assistance from I have to concur.
DESKI with it not being changed was, is and untouchable with ANY BI product that anyone can or will come up with.
Crystal trash should have been the component SAP trashed. Being that its been around since the 80s given away for free should have been the drive to put it to rest as another Batch reporting tool for Legacy platforms.
di652 (BOB member since 2005-02-24)
I also concur… I mean just the fact that this Subject has the Most read or if not One of the MOST read subjects in this forum has to tell you that DESKI IS still the King of BI tools. That’s why users won’t give it up for a 3rd rate desktop tool like Crystal; Microstrategy, Cognos. This coming from a developer who has only used DESKI a couple of years and used to work in and with Crystal and Microstrategey before.
ColumbiaIT (BOB member since 2011-06-15)
The best thing that SAP could do now is provide an assessment of what is missing when comparing XI3.1 Deski with BI 4.1 Webi Rich Client. This would prove to those that are still holding on to Deski now have very few reasons not to migrate. If VBA macros are the only reason to stay on Deski then SAP’s work is complete and the Deski evangelists would have to really consider what they do in VBA macros and assess workarounds.
I’ve been using Rich Client for a few years now and it’s much better than basic Webi imo.
They did that, but it is horribly inaccurate, even as of XI3.1*.
I can tell you that there are several non-quantifiable reasons why many of us still cling to DeskI – such as the interface being much more intuitive, way faster to work in, more stable, can handle larger reports, etc. I like WebI, and it gets better with (almost) every release. But when I have a need for something quickly, or when I have a SQL script and I want to see its results in a crosstab, I’m going to launch DeskI.
As far as VBA – it’s absolutely correct that anyone who is dependent on VBA for production reporting will need to seek a workaround. But those workarounds include the possibility of non-SAP tools. MSBI is starting to make headway in the BI market, and I have no doubt that it will pick up more than a few SAP customers.
*Export to HTML and Complex Conditions are two glaring omissions; and I’m not sure why “Templates” and “Custom functions” are shown as available in WebI.
joepeters (BOB member since 2002-08-29)
Reads to me like a few people should be building their own BI Solution from scratch.
And then building it up, giving great service, taking market share … and selling it to ruination with one of the big boys.
Damocles (BOB member since 2006-10-05)
Or just buy a version of the source code for Supervisor / Designer / Deski like MS did with Sybase to create SQL Server?
As for “old school” I’ll paraphrase a remark, attributed to Willem De Sitter, Dutch astronomer in Leiden, between around 1890 and 1934 :
when trying to purchase a new type of telescope, he wrote to a collaegue :
The German salesman asks: “How do you want it built?” , but the British one says: “That is not in our catalogue”. ( That was in the early 1920’s, when politics didn’t want him to deal with Germans “too much”. )
I don’t think that BO originally was German, nor that SAP be British.
But the comparison stands: different companies have different philosophy.
Will we find a supplier with a servi(ca)able philosophy, that benefits the company but the clients as well ?
IF we are “on our own”, why not go “open source - community edition” of something like Pentaho ?
ANY transition will be difficult.
The PRODUCT BO is still good. But documentation is fragmented, and the company is not easy on their clients.
And they are “expensive”
Well, SAP has “partners”, who might ease the transition to BI4 for us.
RensH 
(BOB member since 2007-06-18)
I’d like this 
back to the roots - free deski 
Wolfgang Bidner 
(BOB member since 2002-08-30)
I do believe it was a French company originally.
shaffner (BOB member since 2004-07-22)
You remember correctly : ) But this is now almost 7 years back.
Andreas (BOB member since 2002-06-20)
First French company traded on NASDAQ. Bases in Paris, California and Vancouver.
I remember them buying Crystal in 2003.