Re:Mathematica 7.0 Released Today
by gaius on Wednesday November 19, 2008 @07:11AM
(#369398)
It's not a matter of "dabbling" or "sanity", it's a matter of making a niche product that takes a lot of very qualified people years of work. The market for individual consumers that would buy Mathematica is tiny. You might as well wonder why SAP don't "dabble" with a "sane" price point for R/3 for home users to balance their chequebooks.
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I'm not completely convinced. I'd love to use Mathematica for modeling some of the stuff that we're doing, but no way I'm going to drop $4000 on it (the price where I live). $500 and I'd do it immediately.
Re:Mathematica 7.0 Released Today
by JulianMorrison on Wednesday November 19, 2008 @06:37PM
(#370092)
"Shockingly rich professors of mathematics" - a harshly vertical niche, no wonder the per-unit price is high. But I think they've painted themselves into a bit of an unnecessary corner. Mathematica is a universal workhorse and math has huge applicability. I think they could cut the per-unit price and make it up on volume, selling into commerce and academia. Heck, I'd be inclined to offer "open source user" licenses free for private individuals who agreed to CC license their results and their code libraries.
Who makes more money, Toyota or Rolls Royce?
"Who makes more money, Toyota or Rolls Royce?"
I'd leave off the automotive comparison. Porsche is rich enough to contemplate buying Volkswagen.
I expect, like Oracle, almost all users of Mathematica are on their institution or employer's site licence.
There's plenty of cheap maths software (e.g. MathCad) and free (e.g. Sage, Octave) around.