This New York Times article about the R programming language is pretty good, though there is a hilarious quote in it from proprietary software company that apparently make a similar product. Anne H. Milley, director of technology product marketing at SAS says:
“We have customers who build engines for aircraft. I am happy they are not using freeware when I get on a jet.”
That’s pretty funny. She’s basically saying
“It’s better to build important things with tools you can’t examine for yourself.”
SAS claim to have over 40,000 customer sites worldwide. The news article claim 250,000 people use R regularly. The difference here isn’t in the numbers of users, it’s that, with R, every user is a potential developer. SAS can’t possibly compete with that.
Comments
As a SAS marketing guy, I have my own biases, but I don’t necessarily see this as a competition with R, no matter how many people use it. Both tools are applied to the same field but it’s not a competition for two reasons: the analytics market is growing and there’s room for several players, plus SAS and R have appeal to very different user sets. It’s worth a peek at a followup post by Anne Milley who was quotes in the Times. See http://blogs.sas.com/sascom/
Hi John,
I am a Technical Editor working with Packt. We are planning to publish a book on R. I am looking for technical reviewers to provide feedback on the content of the book. It would be of great help, if you would be willing to take it up. Please visit http://www.packtpub.com/author_reviewing_for_packt for more details regarding reviewing.We will also like you to know that you will be receiving two copies of the book once it is published and your name will be credited as well.
Thanks,
Meeta
I’m trying to justify continuing to use SAS in my data manipulation and statistical analysis work vs. usinging MS SQL or MYSQL etc, and R. I know SAS has a huge user base etc, but it seems like such an old and cobbled together language and is so expensive. What am I giving up if I dump it?