On Fri, 2004-06-04 at 09:19, Paul Gilbert wrote: > Ko-Kang Kevin Wang wrote: > > >It is not only used by statisticians or scientists, > >but also econometricians and people in finance due to its cost (FREE) > >and its powerfulness. > > > I think "(FREE)" will distract your intended audience from the real > point. In a corporate environment, lots of people argue that free > software actually costs more than commercial software because of > internal support cost, etc, etc. These arguments will all hinge > critically on the corporate IT support abilities. For R, I have never > seen a convincing argument that it costs more, but the real point is > that this is irrelevant. If it costs less, that is nice. If it costs > more, then that is what you pay to use something that is better. If they > need to, I think people in finance are generally willing to pay, so I > think it is a mistake to put much emphasis on the cost. Put the emphasis > on how good it is.
I agree that quality and value are important, but I think that the issue of cost should not be discounted out of hand. Value (for both company and client) is directly tied to cost. Cost may be less of a concern for very large corporations to some extent, though certainly non-trivial as we continue to see companies finding ways to reduce their cost of operations as an important part of the strategy to improve profitability. Typically, this is done via reductions in personnel costs (ie. layoffs, reductions in benefits, salary/wage cuts, etc.), but IT costs are surely a target as is noted daily/weekly/monthly in various IT and business trade rags. IT costs are not just those associated with the initial purchase, but with ongoing operating costs as well. I can speak from personal experience, as the President and Owner of a health care consulting business who has funded this operation with my own funds, that cost is a significant issue. I do not have shareholders or private investors providing operating capital with the promise of future returns on their investments. Every dollar I spend has to be recovered via client billings or it comes out of my own pocket. This is not just important for me, but for my clients as well. The more I spend on "the cost of doing business", the more that I would have to pass on to my clients to recoup those same costs. My ability to offer clients reasonable project fees is directly correlated to my underlying cost structure. There is a market driven threshold beyond which I could not pass those costs on to clients and still have clients willing to pay for services. A product like SAS for example, which I had previously used for a number of years working for a larger medical software company, is no longer affordable to me as a small business owner. The last time that I checked, the annual licensing for a single user commercial license for Base, Stat and Graph was in the neighborhood of $5,000 U.S. **Per Year**. That is for _one person_. Calculate those costs for a larger staff... Even a product such as that other "R like" commercial offering, while less costly than SAS, still adds to overhead. I would rather allocate the funds for that product along with my time, to supporting the R Foundation and this community to repay the value and benefit that I receive from it (which is nothing short of phenomenal). The bottom line is that cost is a non-trivial issue. If a company is willing to pay more for a functionally equivalent product, because the training and support is (or is perceived to be) superior so be it. That may enable managers and other decision makers to sleep better at night. I would however challenge the level of support provided by any commercial company to that which is provided by this community, given the depth and breadth of expertise present and the expedience with which communications take place here. I use R. My company benefits from it. My clients benefit from it. ..and I sleep just fine (when I do sleep)... :-) Regards, Marc Schwartz ______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list https://www.stat.math.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide! http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
