Jay Jaffe Wrote:

> But THIS DOES NOT MEAN "Don't use it". It MAY mean "Don't use it for >production systems." but -- as was the case with 6.06 -- there's plenty >new stuff that you should be practicing.

It sounds to me like there are plenty of old things SAS should be practicing, like QUALITY before PR! I don't have time for a toy that calls itself a production system, so why don't they just call it Alpha 8 and save people a lot of wasted time and effort?

> So you can't really build the most rad systems even for alpha test.

That is truly pathetic! Especially given the number of years they have been crowing about the major upgrades that people have wanted for a long time! Simple things like long variable and dataset names.

On their web site they have a pdf document that states: "V7 will initially ship to 100 sites in the Nov/Dec 1998 timeframe. THE LIMITED SHIPMENT IS TO ENSURE THAT THE INSTALLATION PROCESS IS VALIDATED AND COMPLETELY DOCUMENTED. In the first quarter of 1999, V7 will ship on a BY-REQUEST basis to additional QUALIFIED SITES." (caps added by me.) This is so pathetic, now they can say that V7 went out in 1998 even though they are releasing a half-baked system.

> In fairness to S.I., the challenges of the new core architectures are >worth getting right, and it was also right to release v7 as they had >been promising it within 1998 for so damn long. So it's got problems. >But we all got problems.

This is not what I expected from SI, especially for the big $ shelled out by companies every year to keep the SAS R&D engine going, but my future expectations are rapidly changing. Maybe a competitor will have a chance in the pharmaceutical companies (one of their biggest revenue generators) if they keep this ridiculous approach up! Maybe JG should use some of those billions to hire people that aren't YES managers and find out what they think of the way he is running the SAS reputation into the ground! I would never recommend anyone to use this release of V7 for anything of importance in a company.

As an example of SAS lagging, I took the Data Warehousing class earlier this year. I have also worked with other DW tools and I am currently implementing a competitors web-based OLAP system at a company. The SAS warehouse tool seemed very thin in functionality and not to easy to use. Translation, if SAS wasn't already in use at so many companies, it would not have been bought by too many companies. And the cost, $80,000! I almost laughed out loud in class when I heard that price after seeing the product! SAS should be dominating data mining and warehousing given they were being used for this purpose years before any true competitors existed!

Another simple example, for power analysis in clinical study design. How many people would rather use SAS than something like SOLO Power Analysis software? Sure, it could be done in SAS. Or I can do it in SOLO in 10% of the time with an easy to use GUI and it costs $500 to OWN the software!

I could go on, but I won't!

Signed, A disgruntled user of 10+ years, Stephen McDaniel Convergence Consulting, LLC