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st: RE: statalist-digest V4 #2490
The implication that the business people are consistently and persistently
making a mistake by not using Stata is not credible. Information leaks
everywhere. The important thing is what people actually do with the leaked
information.
The recent spread of data mining is a case in point. Michael Lewis's book,
Moneyball, was heavily criticized for the view that the baseball roster was
inefficient. To make the story short, after the book came out in 2003, the
statistical approach at the Oakland As has been hired away or replicated by
other teams within the year. The Red Sox fans should thank Michael Lewis for
their 2004 season, including the World Series.
The information about Stata has leaked long ago. What did the business
people do with the leaked information? Structural equations are rarely used
in data mining. The unbiasedness of esimators or the robustness of standard
errors doen't matter, either. You just want your data handled properly. A
business manager with 100gb of data is not going to settle for 1gb of
analysis at a time.
Stata is meant for researchers, but not because the business people are not
smart enough to figure it out.
I am not sure if Stata can penetrate the business market without a
signficant changes in how it handles memory. It's probably not a coincidence
that SAS followed the development of harddrives in 1960s and Stata followed
the spread of integrated RAM in 1980s.
Strategic positions have been taken, which are highly defensible, but you
can't easily invade the other side either. Changes would be imposed if
someone invents a memory that is both fast (RAM) and permanent (harddrive),
but that seems unlikely in the near future. There is no doubt that Stata has
been adversely affected by the memory management under the 32-bit Windows
(the 1.4gb limit). You can blame it on the othe Bill G.
Roy
The indications do appear to be that Stata has made less impact on business
than competitors
-- which goes in a perfect circle with Stata
aiming squarely at researchers -- but your initial analysis sounds like a
spoof or parody of Economics 100.
So the market seizes all opportunities and with perfect efficiency???
Your analysis seems to leave no scope for ignorance
or prejudice to have any effect.
Even in economics several Nobel Prizes have gone
to people who pointed out that decision-making is a whole lot more
complicated than that.
And in business itself many companies have spent
large fortunes on data mining and so forth, mostly because they _hoped_
that that would give
them an advantage over the competition....
The key question is who makes the decisions and what information do they
have. What information
do people have in business when they decide against Stata, or do not decide
for Stata?
Nick [email protected]
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