There has been an active discussion thread on Chris Webb’s blog about the similarities & differences between various Microsoft BI & reporting tools. This is becoming a very popular topic and I thought I’d post my reply to that thread here. I encourage you to read the entire post on Chris’s blog here: Some thoughts on what Office 2013 means for Microsoft BI
…These are some very interesting thoughts about the differences in capabilities between SSRS and Power View. As Microsoft continues to introduce more choices, I think that people generally want to use one or fewer tools to do more things – which causes us to think about tools like Power View replacing other tools like SSRS. I’ve been in a lot of discussions with members of the Reporting Services product team about the future of both SSRS (RDL or “professional reports”) and Power View. First of all, it’s noteworthy that Power View is developed by the SSRS development team and they see it as part of the total SSRS offering. There is no intention for Power View to replace professional reports. However, we are likely to see some features introduce to the advanced tool that might make it behave more like the self-service tool. I can’t speak on behalf of Microsoft but, like Chris, I do have some insight into what’s coming and I think we can expect to see three tools: A simple, self-service analysis tool for the desktop user (Power View), a mobile BI tool that runs on tablet devices, similar in some ways to Power View (recently announced at the SharePoint conference); and professional reports that support the kinds of advanced design techniques IT pros use in SSRS today.