On Thu, Oct 17, 2013 at 3:18 PM, Dr. David Kirkby <drkir...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 12 October 2013 18:21, William Stein <wst...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Maybe. One important fact is that -- measured by downloads or website
>> hits -- usage of Sage ("the free software") has *not* grown at all in
>> the last 3 years. For example, if you define number of active users as
>> at http://trac.sagemath.org/ticket/1000, then the number of users has
>> floated between 10,000 and 15,000 for several years. This suggests
>> perhaps Sage is not fully succeeding at the mission statement I set
>> for the project at the beginning, which is to provide a viable
>> alternative to the Ma's, since they claim much larger active usage
>> numbers.
>
> I do wonder where they get their numbers from some times. Wolfram
> Research claimed over a million users more than a decade ago, but why
> do I see so few jobs wanting Mathematica skills? Search on a job site
> for jobs needing MATLAB and there are tons of them. Do the same for
> Mathematica, and there are very very few indeed. I do wonder how large
> the user base of Mathematica really is.
We can make a very, very rough estimate of the Mathematica revenue
based on the number of employees. For example, to get a low-ball
lower bound, let's say 500 employees (*), which each cost $100K/year
on average; that's $50million/year in revenue. If a Mathematica
"seat" costs "on average" $50/year, then that's 1 million seats.
There are other revenue sources, such as Wolfram|Alpha...
Conclusion: Mathematica probably sells more than 10,000 "seats" of
licenses a year, since selling only 10,000 seats wouldn't generate
enough revenue to sustain their employee base, unless they have many
other revenue streams.
With webapps (of all kinds -- gmail, cloud.sagemath, whatever) it';s
striking because the vendor knows exactly how many people use their
service, for how long each day, with what frequency, etc. There is no
guesswork at all in deducing usage. WRI has enough control to know
how many legal copies of Mathematica get *installed*, but they know
little about how often they are used (unless Mathematica secretly
phones home, of course). For example, I installed mathematica on my
laptop for a year, and didn't use it at all -- the first time I tried
to use it, was during a talk, and it failed due to the license running
out and me not noticing... :-)
-- William
(*) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfram_Research says "400+
employees". In 2008, their website said "650+" and Eric Weistein told
me (in person) that they were "expanding a lot" then.
>
> Dave
>
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--
William Stein
Professor of Mathematics
University of Washington
http://wstein.org
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