Comments for r4stats.com http://r4stats.com Analyzing the World of Analytics Tue, 21 May 2013 23:58:39 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ Comment on Forecast Update: Will 2014 be the Beginning of the End for SAS and SPSS? by Christoph Waldhauser http://r4stats.com/2013/05/14/beginning-of-the-end-v2/#comment-8303 Tue, 21 May 2013 23:58:39 +0000 http://r4stats.com/?p=985#comment-8303 I really enjoyed reading your article and the comments. There is however another bit that would belong into the discussion, that has not yet been mentioned (or I over-read it). Let’s start with a provocative statement: in my books, teaching SAS/SPSS at Universities almost amounts to misappropriation of funds. Let me explain. By spending vast amounts of cash for software deals, this money is then lacking at other places like lab seats or smaller classes. In return, Unis get programs that de-facto vendor lock-in their students (and faculty). A common counter argument is, that Unis need to teach what industry requires. However, I believe that Unis job is to teach knowledge, and not to vendor-lock their students in specific software. If someone understands statistics, learning SAS or SPSS is not that much of a hassle anymore. However, teaching statistics with R, being able to demonstrate how calculations are done and results come about, gives any educator a definite advantage. So I hope that R (or any other free successor, for that matter) will eventually dominate.

Forgive my tone, but at the moment I’m a little bit disgruntled because I just spent half a year trying to convince some Unis in Serbia to use exclusively R in their newly established statistics program, and failed.

]]> Comment on Forecast Update: Will 2014 be the Beginning of the End for SAS and SPSS? by Bob Muenchen http://r4stats.com/2013/05/14/beginning-of-the-end-v2/#comment-8222 Tue, 21 May 2013 13:13:40 +0000 http://r4stats.com/?p=985#comment-8222 Hi Tim,

It’s nice to hear from you! I miss those SPSS Directions meetings. IBM priced them out of the academic market. I agree with all your points. I’ll write a new post soon based on job advertisements (mostly corporate) that reinforces your point.

Cheers,
Bob

]]> Comment on Forecast Update: Will 2014 be the Beginning of the End for SAS and SPSS? by Tim Daciuk http://r4stats.com/2013/05/14/beginning-of-the-end-v2/#comment-8164 Mon, 20 May 2013 20:36:48 +0000 http://r4stats.com/?p=985#comment-8164 Hey Bob,
Tim Daciuk here; I think that we did a couple of presentations and/or were on a panel together, back “in the day” (when I was part of SPSS Inc). Interesting article and interesting use of forecasting. Certainly the use of R is expanding; mostly due to the cost if R. I think however that to measure trends from a primarily from an academic/scholastic bent may be problematic. If you take. A look at ‘industry’ I think that SPSS and SAS are still the big gorillas in the market and will be for the foreseeable future. I think at this is due to a number of factors: 1) the ‘one throat to choke’ ability of having a company stand behind the product; 2) the end-to-end solutioning that SAS and SPSS offer (as predictive analytics becomes a business integrated function) which is not the with R; the development of vertical applications (mentioned earlier), and; the existing ancillary development and integration network around SPSS and SAS (though this is changing).

P.S. I tend to rely on the Colbert statistic for a lot of my work!

]]> Comment on Forecast Update: Will 2014 be the Beginning of the End for SAS and SPSS? by Bob Muenchen http://r4stats.com/2013/05/14/beginning-of-the-end-v2/#comment-8151 Mon, 20 May 2013 17:06:31 +0000 http://r4stats.com/?p=985#comment-8151 Hi Masanori,

Thanks for the translation!

Cheers,
Bob

]]> Comment on The Popularity of Data Analysis Software by Bob Muenchen http://r4stats.com/articles/popularity/#comment-8150 Mon, 20 May 2013 16:55:59 +0000 http://r4stats.wordpress.com/?page_id=4#comment-8150 Hi Rosaria,

I started out studying just classic statistics packages while the data mining software came from data collected by others. However I do hope to expand the graphs next year to include them. There’s little real difference between the two types of software other than the user interface, which is better on most data mining packages.

Cheers,
Bob

]]> Comment on The Popularity of Data Analysis Software by Rosaria http://r4stats.com/articles/popularity/#comment-8149 Mon, 20 May 2013 16:46:21 +0000 http://r4stats.wordpress.com/?page_id=4#comment-8149 Do you think you can include more of KNIME in some of your graphs? I am curious to see how it compares. I use KNIME and I have seen it cited only in figure 3 and figure 4.

]]> Comment on Forecast Update: Will 2014 be the Beginning of the End for SAS and SPSS? by Masanori Yoshida http://r4stats.com/2013/05/14/beginning-of-the-end-v2/#comment-8036 Sun, 19 May 2013 06:45:03 +0000 http://r4stats.com/?p=985#comment-8036 Thank you very much for your interesting article.
I translated your article into Japanese. Please let me know if you are not comfortable with my translation.
https://www.facebook.com/masanori.yoshida.3517/posts/470142369728338

]]> Comment on Forecast Update: Will 2014 be the Beginning of the End for SAS and SPSS? by Fr. http://r4stats.com/2013/05/14/beginning-of-the-end-v2/#comment-7973 Sat, 18 May 2013 16:19:41 +0000 http://r4stats.com/?p=985#comment-7973 I agree with a lot of that, because this view is problem-driven and takes staff turnover into account. My own experience of teaching R and Stata also converges with Bob’s “free puppy” remark below, and the comments that describe RStudio as the clear winner among R interfaces are also correct in my view, although there is indeed a difference between pushing buttons in a GUI and using an IDE.

As far as I can tell, the current market can be summarized in three trends: fast ubiquitous growth through cutting-edge innovation (R), slower sectoral growth driven by path dependency (SAS) and specificity (Stata), and decline or stagnation (everything else, including SPSS).

]]> Comment on Forecast Update: Will 2014 be the Beginning of the End for SAS and SPSS? by Bob Muenchen http://r4stats.com/2013/05/14/beginning-of-the-end-v2/#comment-7890 Fri, 17 May 2013 14:04:58 +0000 http://r4stats.com/?p=985#comment-7890 Hi Nick,

Good point. Open source fanatics love the two “frees” — free beer i.e. free to use and freedom to change — but tend to downplay the “free puppy” one. You may totally love it, but it’s gonna cost you! I agree that Stata pricing is quite a deal for a single-user SE license for business ($845/yr) and the Small Stata license for students at $49/yr is decent. Where Stata pricing gets crazy is on servers. A 64-core server with 25 users is $75K/$40K for business/academia. The smallest cluster our group has is 5,000 cores, and the largest has 100,000. Such needs are not common, but we do use R at high scale (e.g. http://www.r-bloggers.com/r-at-12000-cores/). SAS Institute recently woke up and made their licensing for unlimited copies on unlimited servers at all our campuses for not much more than Stata charges for one small server. I’m sure they realized that too much Big Data work in academia was using R and they needed to address that.

I don’t mean to imply that any of these packages are not worth their asking prices. As long as they are able to sell the software, it’s worth the price. But I’m glad open source projects such as R and RapidMiner are there to help drive prices down.

Cheers,
Bob

]]> Comment on Forecast Update: Will 2014 be the Beginning of the End for SAS and SPSS? by Bob Muenchen http://r4stats.com/2013/05/14/beginning-of-the-end-v2/#comment-7885 Fri, 17 May 2013 12:33:58 +0000 http://r4stats.com/?p=985#comment-7885 Guten Tag Berry,

While MATLAB and R have much in common, MATLAB use is dominated by solving engineering problems rather than statistical analysis or data mining. If I could think of a way to split that use out, I would love to do it.

Tschüss,
Bob

]]>