Which brings me to the subject of this post: what is Mathematica for? Because unless can answer that question, you can't answer the earlier one. But in order to maintain your competitive position you have to be crystal clear in your understanding of what the value proposition is, and why customers will (continue to) pay for your product. The answer to that question is, of course, yes. To which, I suppose, the answer might be: "Are you quite sure that is inevitable? Are there not examples of for-profit products that are so good they are able to maintain market share in the face of cost-free alternatives?". But I rather suspect otherwise and instead tend to believe that Mathematica is losing influence and relevance, regardless of whatever I may think of the product.Īnother response might be: "Of course we are losing market share to license-free, direct competitor products. It could be, for example, that the downward trend in Mathematica interest is a reflection of a decision by WR to increase prices over time, to maximize profits, i.e. Now this "analysis" is of course over-simplistic. Or perhaps I should say, more accurately, its a challenge for proprietary mathematical programming languages: Its a general problem for mathematical programming languages. For example, here's the comparable chart for Matlab: Firstly this is not just a Mathematica issue. And someone, somewhere, in WR needs to be asking the question I am posing in this post, if they are seriously hoping to check that trend and reverse it. You don't need a model to figure out the long term trend in that time series. I realize that I am possibly the only Mathematica user to suffer from existential angst for the product, but still, its worth pausing to ask the question, what is Mathematica for? Meaning, what is its purpose?īut for those of you pragmatists tempted to roll your eyes and just get on with using it, let me motivate the question with a chart:
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