Comment on SAS under pressure from Pentaho by dubyam

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As a grad student in stat, I have used both SAS and R. Have not heard much about pentaho, but sounds interesting.

But I cannot let this go: the graph/stats are very misleading.

The graph of sas institute v. pentaho: Most people know SAS as “SAS” not “SAS Institute”. So when googling the resources i don’t think they’d be googling “SAS Institute” to find out more about the product. I know that it’s impossible to distinguish “SAS” from “SAS Airlines”, “SAS Institue” or “SAS shoes”, or who knows what else with those three simple letters. (I google trended that and it was obviously a landslide in favor the other way) So to compare “SAS” to “Pentaho” would not be fair either. But that graph must be taken with a grain of salt.

Secondly, comparing market share growth for established companies to the growth of an emerging enterprise is apples to oranges. Like saying height growth rate for a 20 year old is much smaller than that of a 5 year old. Of course it’ll be flat after a while! Analogous?

Not to rain on the parade, but just to give an honest assessment.



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