RE: st: Stata vs SPSS

["roy wada" <roywada@hotmail.com>]

Compared to SAS/SPSS, Stata has not penetrated the private sector.

Although it may come as a bit of surprise given Stata's analytical power, 
the lack of market penetration telling us something. It is highly doubtful 
that anyone or any company in business would consistently fail to make use 
of something that would give them advantage over their competition. If 
hiring a Stata programmer would help them make more money, they would have 
done so already.

The fact that Stata is not well positioned for the business market. There is 
no point in doing fancy things when the data is dirty and incomplete. The 
only good thing about the business data is its sheer size. Unfortunately, 
Stata is not equipped to handle a large data with billions of data points.

In other words, the major advanage of Stata (analytical power) is irrelevant 
and its major disadvantage (size limitation) is proving to be critical in 
business. The demand for Stata is still out there, of course, but only with 
smaller data and not with the large data (and the large money) associated 
with large corporations.

The lack of printer-ready outputs is probably less important to Stata, given 
that it should have been fixed if the Stata Corp (which is also a 
competitive firm) thought it important enough. The capacity for 
printer-ready outputs would be nice, but it probably would not improve 
Stata's strategic position relative to SAS/SPSS, for whom the ability to 
make printer-ready outputs would be complimentary with their existing 
business model.

Incidiently, many end users of SAS/SPSS readily agree that Stata dominates 
SAS/SPSS when it comes to analysis.

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.soft-sys.sas/search?group=comp.soft-sys.sas&q=stata+spss+better&qt_g=1

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