Re: Re: st: Popularity of R, SAS, SPSS, Stata, Statistica, S-PLUS updated

[David Souther <davidsoutheremail@gmail.com>]

I really can't tell if Argyn's thread hijack is geared toward scaring
Stata into changing its licensing model or if this is just a R fan-boy
rant.  Sure, R-in-a-cloud would serve a certain niche, but I can't
believe it would displace (or even "blow out of the water")
single-license users of Stata.
How many users really need 100-node, or for that matter, a more than
one node to run their data?
How many users have the technical savvy to set up such a configuration?
How many users would be willing to put confidential data on a rented
server farm or cloud?
I doubt the total number of users that need these large resources is a
very small portion of Stata users or potential users.  Certainly not
enough to put Stata out of business "in 2 years"!

There are a lot of other advantages to R -- especially for power
users/programmers-- but Stata still beats R in terms of user
friendliness & ease of learning syntax.  It's probably not a stretch
to say that R is far more difficult to learn and use.

Cheers,
DS

On Fri, Mar 25, 2011 at 9:27 AM, Argyn Kuketayev
<akuketayev@mail.primaticsfinancial.com> wrote:
> Once someone comes up with an easy way to configure and deploy R in
> the cloud, it will blow everything else out of the water. Cloud is a
> game changer.
>
> You can get 100 nodes each 68.4 GB RAM, 8 virtual cores, 64-bit Linux
> at $200/hour total price for hardware lease. And you pay as you go, if
> you get the servers for 1 hour, you pay only $200. Imagine how much
> would this cost with SAS or other commercial package just for
> licensing itself. Unless Stata, SAS and others figure out the
> pay-as-you go licensing, they'll be done in 2 years.
>
> cheers
> --
> Argyn Kuketayev
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