Date: Wed, 10 Mar 1999 12:27:06 +1100
Reply-To: Tim CHURCHES <TCHUR@DOH.HEALTH.NSW.GOV.AU>
Sender: "SAS(r) Discussion" <SAS-L@UGA.CC.UGA.EDU>
From: Tim CHURCHES <TCHUR@DOH.HEALTH.NSW.GOV.AU>
Subject: Re: Yet more thoughts on SAS for Linux -Reply
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
John Whittington writes:
> Jack, I been watching this debate silently up until now, but the point you
> have just made is one that occurred to me very early on. I couldn't agree
> with you more. No manufacturer/supplier is really going to want to 'try to
> interest people in their products' by exposing them to versions of that
> product which are seriously inferior to the current ones. It would be a bit
> like trying to persuade the general public of the advantages of buying a
> state-of-the-art 1999 PC by giving away free DOS-only 386 ones; the
> chances are that this would 'confirm the worst fears' of potential
> purchasers!
John,
The motivation behind my suggestion was to make SAS available to people for whom it is currently beyond reach due to cost and/or hardware requirements, with the aims of a) allowing such people to benefit from using SAS and b) increasing the global pool of people who are SAS-literate (in terms of what SAS can be used for as well as understanding SAS programming syntax). I doubt that many of those people would go on the take out SAS licenses themselves, but they might end up working as SAS programmers for companies which do license SAS, or they might end up suggesting SAS as a solution to employers who don't currently license SAS. But I agree that it would be important to steer individuals or organisations who CAN afford SAS licenses away from outdated versions and make it easier for them to try out the current version. The SI web site doesn't exactly make it clear to a first time visitor that free trials are available.
I suspect that an even greater turn-off than an antiquated version for many prospective SAS licensers is the "sticker shock" when they learn the price, particular individual users and smaller organisations. These people and organisations end up buying SPSS or similar. Please note that I am not whingeing about the cost of SAS - I have come to regard it as quite good value for money, all things consiered, but such value for money may not be apparent at first. And talking of antiquated interfaces, I regularly get calls from first-time SAS users in our organisation (running V6.12 for Windows) who ask (reasonably) "Where is the menu choice to do a cross-tabulation?" (Obviously they used SPSS at uni!) You can imagine the response when I tell them "No, no, you just type in this little programme...". Yes, we have a few licenses for SAS/ASSIST but I wouldn't put it forward as a paragon of modernity with respect to the user interface...
Cheers,
Tim C
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