On Wed, Feb 4, 2009 at 4:59 PM, rjf <fate...@gmail.com> wrote: > 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.
That makes sense. >>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. I think he means that of the mathematically inclined people in the world, a huge number of them are neither working in higher education or are students. They are engineers, scientists, quantitative analysts, code breakers, etc. >> 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. I wonder -- it seems MMA doesn't agree with that assertion. I have no opinion personally. > > >>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. For many engineering applications Matlab blows Mathematica out of the water, and I wouldn't even consider Mathematica competition. For many applications in pure mathematics -- hobbyists, education, research, combinatorics, number theory, etc. -- I think that Mathematica is vastly better than Matlab. Apples and Oranges. >> 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. In the US academic education environment I think your statement above agrees 100% with what I've seen. However, I expect that is not the environment Michael is talking about or that the new Mathematica $300 "Home Version" license is aimed at. William William Stein Associate Professor of Mathematics University of Washington http://wstein.org --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sage-devel-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
