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All of their products are like this. It's just a Wolfram thing and I doubt they'll ever change. It's a shame because I would genuinely love to use their product

All of their products are like this. It's just a Wolfram thing and I doubt they'll ever change. It's a shame because I would genuinely love to use their products, but the upfront costs and insanely difficult licensing mean that most people never learn the software at home, companies refuse to use it internally, and nothing ever gets built.

janalsncm 4y ago
It doesn’t make sense at all. Why choose to be insanely expensive? I guess by the time you’ve signed a contract there’s a lot of sunk cost ($1000 to be exact) but I can’t understand that strategy long-term.
- SilverBirch 4y ago
  Back to the original comment: >If they took off the minimum commitment it would open this up to a lot more people. That's literally the point. They don't want a lot more people, if you price something such that anyone can pick it up and try it you're going to have to put a lot of effort into support and fielding queries from these small customers and some businesses just aren't interested in that. Yeah, maybe it turns out that one of those thousands of small customers turns into a unicorn, but there are plenty of businesses that just don't care. They don't want the fuss. They want extremely large customers who they can sign large support and development contracts with.
  - AlotOfReading 4y ago
    That exists, but I don't think it's the whole story in this case. Wolfram (both the man and the company) simply doesn't appreciate the value of user-contributions and decentralized communities of practitioners. They've published blog statements defending their model [0] and explaining how everyone who wants anything different is actually misunderstanding their value prop [1]. Wolfram also makes no meaningful attempts at cultivating any sort of internal desire to use their products. I'm pretty sure we'd have to pry Matlab from the cold, dead hands of our controls people. We terminated our (~6 figure?) Wolfram contact because less than a dozen people used the products, Wolfram support was non-existent, and IT put their foot down on maintaining the license server. [0] https://blog.wolfram.com/2019/04/02/why-wolfram-tech-isnt-open-source-a-dozen-reasons/ https://blog.wolfram.com/2019/04/02/why-wolfram-tech-isnt-op... [1] https://blog.wolfram.com/2021/11/30/six-reasons-why-the-wolfram-language-is-like-open-source/ https://blog.wolfram.com/2021/11/30/six-reasons-why-the-wolf...

janalsncm 4y ago

It doesn’t make sense at all. Why choose to be insanely expensive? I guess by the time you’ve signed a contract there’s a lot of sunk cost ($1000 to be exact) but I can’t understand that strategy long-term.

SilverBirch 4y ago
Back to the original comment: >If they took off the minimum commitment it would open this up to a lot more people. That's literally the point. They don't want a lot more people, if you price something such that anyone can pick it up and try it you're going to have to put a lot of effort into support and fielding queries from these small customers and some businesses just aren't interested in that. Yeah, maybe it turns out that one of those thousands of small customers turns into a unicorn, but there are plenty of businesses that just don't care. They don't want the fuss. They want extremely large customers who they can sign large support and development contracts with.
- AlotOfReading 4y ago
  That exists, but I don't think it's the whole story in this case. Wolfram (both the man and the company) simply doesn't appreciate the value of user-contributions and decentralized communities of practitioners. They've published blog statements defending their model [0] and explaining how everyone who wants anything different is actually misunderstanding their value prop [1]. Wolfram also makes no meaningful attempts at cultivating any sort of internal desire to use their products. I'm pretty sure we'd have to pry Matlab from the cold, dead hands of our controls people. We terminated our (~6 figure?) Wolfram contact because less than a dozen people used the products, Wolfram support was non-existent, and IT put their foot down on maintaining the license server. [0] https://blog.wolfram.com/2019/04/02/why-wolfram-tech-isnt-open-source-a-dozen-reasons/ https://blog.wolfram.com/2019/04/02/why-wolfram-tech-isnt-op... [1] https://blog.wolfram.com/2021/11/30/six-reasons-why-the-wolfram-language-is-like-open-source/ https://blog.wolfram.com/2021/11/30/six-reasons-why-the-wolf...