On Feb 4, 3:26 pm, mabshoff <mabsh...@googlemail.com> wrote:
...
>
> Well, I still think that the financial crises also has a large part to
> do with this offer
Maybe.
> and it is also all about maximizing the number of
> MMA license you can sell.
No, I think it is more likely NOT about maximizing the number of
licenses. It is about maximizing revenue, short and long term.
Wolfram is running a business.
>And there is likely a huge market for the
> mathematically inclined that are not working in higher education and
> no longer students
Why do you think so? Can you cite any statistics on this?
There are very few people who are mathematically inclined.
Even among college students who have taken (required) calculus, the
vast majority of
them view that course as a final, painful, and forgettable
experience. Anyone wishing to
tap into a financial bonanza could find many more profitable niches.
Games. Music.
Database applications for <name some business>.
Especially since there are well-established free programs for numeric
and symbolic math.
> and having them spend $300 on such a MMA license is
> a better return than those people either using pirated copies or not
> MMA at all.
I doubt that this is a big market, and that the majority of their
sales will simply cannibalize the commercial sales.
>Either way, if Sage is part of making Wolfram, Inc. kinder
> and gentler we will all benefit since the more people use CAS the more
You are of course welcome to believe this, but the major competition
for Mathematica
is probably not Sage, but Matlab.
> potential users for Sage are out there. And Sage's long term goal is
> world domination after all :). So is there any MMA mole around here
> who could clue us in? At the main 2008 AMS meeting it become clear
> that at least the technical folks at Wolfram were well aware of the
> existence of Sage,
Of course they are. But with the possible exception of Stephen W. I
doubt that
they are the ones setting marketing strategy.
> but probably William should comment on that. IIRC
> he also had a blog post about the interaction he had at that AMS
> meerting with Wolfram Inc. and MuPAD.
>
> I would also suspect in general that for Matlab, Maple and MMA the
> biggest competition just like for MS are the previous releases of
> their software since switching to the competition implies a high cost
> for moving working code (regardless whether the new program is open or
> not) and that is in the end what we need to overcome to get more users
> from the commercial competition.
I think that the mass number of users comes from first-time calculus
students.
They have not seen Mathematica or Maple or Sage. To get them to be
users, all
you need to do is convince the calculus instructor to use Sage. Of
course most of
these students drop that program regardless. Engineering students may
pick up
Matlab in subsequent courses, since that is more likely to be used in
practice.
>
> One more note: In the above thread a Japanese user commented that the
> current MMA release sets him back a whopping $4,700 when taking into
> account the current exchange rate. The professional release MMA in the
> US might seem obscenely expensive, but that one takes the cake. Note
> that the Solaris version of MMA is still more expensive than that.
The story for software in foreign countries is quite different. For
example,
any software (or for that matter, Hollywood movie) can expect to sell
between 0 and 1
copy for all of China. Copies 2 through infinity will be pirated
versions.
Japan is probably not like China, but maybe the Japanese support
costs are high
relative to the sales expected.
(Old joke: bear goes into a bar and orders a Bud. The surprised
bartender offers
the bear a bottle of beer, and says "$5 please". The bear takes a
wallet out of its fur and pays it.
The bartender say, "Say, we don't get many bears in here."
The bear says, "At that price, no wonder!".
)
RJF
>
>
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