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Statwing is cool, but IMHO it comes from people who have never struggled with the problem it ostensibly solves. Ask anyone who uses SAS/Stata/SPSS what their p

by jmduke 14y ago

Statwing is cool, but IMHO it comes from people who have never struggled with the problem it ostensibly solves. Ask anyone who uses SAS/Stata/SPSS what their pain point is, and I guarantee its not 'analyzing data nicely so I can look at charts instead of SPSS outtables'. The hardest part is collecting and organizing data (which I'm sure is a market Statwing is planning on entering.) Point-and-click stats software is nice, but the people who are using SPSS and Stata weren't hired because they could use SPSS and Stata. (Also, I think its pretty disingenuous to compare SPSS output with Statwing output, because it implies SPSS can't output a similar histogram -- which, of course, it can.)

kylemaxwell 14y ago
I don't think it's for people who need SPSS. Statwing is great for much simpler use cases. When you need statistical heavy lifting, go to SPSS or R or something else that can do all that, but if you're not a statistician / data person and have simpler needs, things like Statwing (and, presumably, Wolfram Alpha Pro) can do a decent job.
glaugh 14y ago
Cofounder here. Totally agree that the hardest thing about data analysis is getting the data together. But it's still true that once you have data, working with SPSS, R, etc. is a nightmare unless you're trained or somewhat technical. I actually did work with SPSS professionally for a couple years. And I was a lot like the roughly half of SPSS users who are nontechnical, and only need the basic analyses. The two biggest painpoints for these users are knowing what test to run when and the difficulty of interpreting and working with the output. There's a ton of people, particularly more technical folks, for whom those are not big pain points, and that's fine too. They're just not in our target audience. Also, RE the output comparison. Valid point if it looked like the implication was that SPSS can't output a histogram. Our point, though, is that we do it by default in the three clicks that it takes to output text, and it takes a lot more work to output even T-Test results in SPSS. Practically speaking, day-to-day nontechnical users don't visualize much in tools like SPSS because it's painful to do so. Thanks for the comment, really appreciate it.

by jmduke 14y ago

kylemaxwell 14y ago

I don't think it's for people who need SPSS. Statwing is great for much simpler use cases. When you need statistical heavy lifting, go to SPSS or R or something else that can do all that, but if you're not a statistician / data person and have simpler needs, things like Statwing (and, presumably, Wolfram Alpha Pro) can do a decent job.

glaugh 14y ago

Cofounder here. Totally agree that the hardest thing about data analysis is getting the data together. But it's still true that once you have data, working with SPSS, R, etc. is a nightmare unless you're trained or somewhat technical. I actually did work with SPSS professionally for a couple years. And I was a lot like the roughly half of SPSS users who are nontechnical, and only need the basic analyses. The two biggest painpoints for these users are knowing what test to run when and the difficulty of interpreting and working with the output. There's a ton of people, particularly more technical folks, for whom those are not big pain points, and that's fine too. They're just not in our target audience. Also, RE the output comparison. Valid point if it looked like the implication was that SPSS can't output a histogram. Our point, though, is that we do it by default in the three clicks that it takes to output text, and it takes a lot more work to output even T-Test results in SPSS. Practically speaking, day-to-day nontechnical users don't visualize much in tools like SPSS because it's painful to do so. Thanks for the comment, really appreciate it.