The Graph Editor, one of the new features of Stata 10, is among the
"conveniences that benefit a large number of users and particularly
prospective users".
Friedrich
On Mon, Jun 30, 2008 at 4:08 PM, David Radwin <[email protected]> wrote:
> I agree that Nick's prediction is true for the population of Stata users and
> would-be users whose next best alternative would be another bona fide
> statistical package like, perhaps, R or SAS.
>
> But for the population of users and would-be users whose next best
> alternative would be a basic spreadsheet/graphing program like Excel, where
> you can designate percentage formats in graphs and tables with the click of
> a button, this convenience and others (like reliably copying and pasting
> tables to a Word document) would greatly outweigh the marginal benefit of
> another arcane estimation method.
>
> The former group is apparently the perceived market for Stata and probably
> the large majority of current users. But the latter group is orders of
> magnitude larger.
>
> Attracting even a tiny fraction of Excel users would no doubt increase
> Stata's user base significantly. I am not advocating that Stata should try
> to compete head-to-head with Excel (heaven forbid!). But a few conveniences
> that benefit a large number of users and particularly prospective users
> seems like a better investment than adding highly specialized statistical
> estimators destined to be used only by a limited and highly sophisticated
> set of users.
>
> David Radwin
>
>
> At 7:40 PM +0100 6/30/08, Nick Cox wrote:
>
>> In a crunch I imagine that most users would
>> prefer StataCorp to make the impossible possible, rather than make the
>> awkward easy.
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