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Let me tell you how tens of thousands, and eventually hundreds of thousands of students totally skipped Wolfram products and proprietary science products in gen
by rg111 5y ago
Let me tell you how tens of thousands, and eventually hundreds of thousands of students totally skipped Wolfram products and proprietary science products in general.
Wolfram products are very highly priced, even much more so for the Indian market.
Indian science and engineering colleges are usually very poorly funded save some IITs and premier provincial universities.
There is no way in hell these colleges could ever have afforded MATLAB or Wolfram products.
C and ForTran were taught at science institues- even at the very best ones.
Students only learned this.
By the year 2018, all of science universities of India fully switched to Python for Physics, Maths, Chemistry, etc. majors.
They now teach NumPy, SciPy, Matplotlib, etc.
They totally skipped Wolfram and Mathworks products.
Why do I say "skipped"? Because with rapid economic growth and visible improvements in college fundings, Indian unis would have soon been able to afford proprietary science software. But they skipped it.
They went straight from ForTran and C to Python ecosystem.
Now, the market is flooded with thousands of core science grads with Python skills who have never worked with MATLAB or Mathematica.
They are the losers in their models.
- kylehotchkiss 5y agoThis article isn’t about the pricing of wolfram software. The price they charge is what it costs to develop, host, and support the software, plus innovate on it. They can’t lower their prices substantially for individual markets. Best to just petition universities harder to arrange this software as software these days is as fundamental to education as the buildings we learn in.
- rg111 5y ago> They can’t lower their prices substantially for individual markets. This comment isn't about me wanting them to lower their prices for any market. > plus innovate on it Please. I would take an Open Source software anyday over Wolfram or Mathworks software. They are objectively much better. > Best to just petition universities harder to arrange this software In case it wasn't clear from my original comment, I am glad, that Indian unis skipped wasting money on such sub-quality software. I am just mentioning that it is their loss. It is not the loss of the students or unis that cannot afford these.
- jetsetgo 5y agoprice of your software should be in tune with the purchasing power of the country you're selling in. every software company does it; even Steam does it with games; it's a proven model
- BlueTemplar 5y agoMATLAB has the open source equivalentS Octave (EDIT : and SciLab !) though..?
- rg111 5y agoThey didn't catch on. I guess Octave's early adopters were the people who already used MATLAB or needed to use it. Indian students did not, and still do not fit into either category. Very few do the ML course on Coursera, and use Octave.
- BlueTemplar 5y agoMy own (non-Indian) experience is that teachers tend to have (use/d) Matlab, but then teach Octave / SciLab to students. (And it wasn't optional in none of the 4 courses I took that used it.)