William wrote: > Sage is free software produced mostly by volunteer work. > There is currently not a single person who is paid fulltime > to work on Sage. The current goal with Sage is not to maximize > profit, and as such, the phrase "target market" is likely have a > different meaning for Sage than for Maple (say), and hence the > answer is likely to be different.
My view of profit is as follows: 1. The net gain from an activity. 2. For a firm: revenue minus cost. www-personal.umich.edu/~alandear/glossary/p.html My position is that people would not use SAGE unless they were gaining something from it. :-) The reason I chose the term "market" is because I think SAGE has evolved to the point where marketing it has become a top priority. Just to be clear, here is the definition of marketing that I am using: "Marketing is the process or act of making products appeal to a certain demographic, or to a consumer." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketing > I see the target audience for Sage today, in order of priority as: > (1) People who can contribute back and would otherwise be likely > to use Magma, > (2) People who can contribute back and would otherwise be likely > to use Maple/Mathematica, > (3) People who would use Magma and not contribute back, > (4) Maple/Mathematica users who would not contribute back, and > (5) Matlab users who would not contribute back. This is how I view SAGE's potential target audience: http://sage.math.washington.edu/home/tkosan/sage_potential_target_audience.png If the goal is to grow SAGE's user base as large as possible, it is my option that SAGE should be marketed as a lower-cost, massively more powerful replacement for the scientific calculator. I also think that the largest group of scientific calculator users in the world consists of high school students. As a number of people have noted on the SAGE lists, getting current mathematicians to learn SAGE is extremely difficult. I think that for every mathematician that one can get to use SAGE, the same amount of effort would be able to get 10+ high school students or other scientific calculator users to use it. Over time, this would translate into a large and increasing number of young mathematicians using SAGE. I think that a large user base would also solve SAGE's programmer shortage problem because programmers could be recruited from this group fairly easily. > Also, perhaps the above priority list would > nearly reverse if Sage were to have either a commercial counterpart (think > Redhat who sell support for Linux) or a generous financial benefactor > (think Mark Shuttleworth who sponsors Ubuntu using his dot-com millions). > Things are much different when people actually get paid > to work on a project <snip> Is there anyone interested in starting a SAGE-based company and offering SAGE as a web service to the scientific calculator target audience? If so, I think that the university I work for could be your first customer. I also have some ideas on how to make a SAGE-based company thrive. Ted --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com 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://sage.scipy.org/sage/ and http://modular.math.washington.edu/sage/ -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
