Microsoft buying Revolution Analytics is another piece of evidence shoes Microsoft has its A-game back. R is massively popular in the statistical community, it

Microsoft buying Revolution Analytics is another piece of evidence shoes Microsoft has its A-game back. R is massively popular in the statistical community, it is basically the PHP of analytics (huge standard library with no namespaces but very easy to get started with and powerful for advanced users). Additionally R is one of the few languages where you can be productive in a non-unix environment. At my old Windows workplace, R was the only open source language with working network NTLM authentication out of the box. Everything can be self-contained in RStudio, an interpreter and gui package manager to stop you jumping to the command line, and a help system to stop you using man. By buying becomming closely associated with R, Microsoft is more likely to be a component in large analytics investments i.e. "let's get Microsoft's R distro, oh and why not their big data plaform too?", and ensures its services and databases are well integrated in this upcoming language.