On Sun, Mar 9, 2008 at 3:55 PM, Chris Chiasson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > My guess is that the 2 million users estimate is inflated by students > who do not really learn these systems. When I was in undergraduate > school, most people barely scratched the surface of Mathematica.
Well I hope Sage also has some inflated numbers by users who use it as students by barely scratch the surface too... but then get hooked, since Sage is (or will hopefully someday be) better than Mathematica. In any case, Mathematica and Matlab have to have a lot of paying customers, and here's an argument to convince you of this. According to their websites, Mathematica has about 600 full time employees (maybe more), and Matlab has over 1,500. If an employee costs $100K/per year on average, say including their office, etc. (that is an extremely conservative estimate), then Mathematica has to take in at least 60 million/year in revenue, and Matlab at least 150 million/year. With academic discounts and site licenses, a copy of Matlab or Mathematica probably costs on average something like $50/year (at UW it costs $100/year for Matlab, and the program self destructs after one year). Thus to get 60 million/year in revenue, Mathematica would have to sell 1.2 million licenses per year. Likewise, to get 150 million/year in revenue, Matlab would have to sell 3 million licenses per year (they sell less, since they definitely charge more than $50/year on average). The website of Matlab says they have "over a million users" and I believe they have "over a million paying customers". -- William > On Mar 9, 11:38 am, "William Stein" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > On Sun, Mar 9, 2008 at 8:31 AM, mhampton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > > I agree; I'm not sure 10^6 users is a useful goal to have, although I > > > am not against it. > > > > Again, the goal is not 10^6 users, it is "to be a viable alternative to > > Maple, Mathematica, Matlab, and Magma". Any free program that > > genuinely attains that goal would *have* to have 10^6 users within > > some reasonable amount of time. Thus I consider the 10^6 business > > not a goal in itself, but a clear way to measure whether we have achieved > > success or not. > > > > > One of my hopes/goals for Sage is to make every mathematics researcher > > > and educator aware of its existence, and for it to be useful to a > > > large fraction of those folks. Accomplishing that would result in > > > roughly 10,000 "users", but many of those users would be deploying it > > > in classes with many students each semester. If you count the > > > students as users, that would give about 10^5 users. > > > > Students would definitely count. > > > > -- > > William Stein > > Associate Professor of Mathematics > > University of Washingtonhttp://wstein.org > > > > > -- William Stein Associate Professor of Mathematics University of Washington http://wstein.org --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
