Marketing (Was: Will Free Axiom change our world?)

On Wed, 16 Apr 2003, Stavros Macrakis wrote:

> An important part of a marketing plan is figuring out the competitive
> landscape and where we want to position ourselves in it.

Great, I'm very happy that this discussion has finally started!

> What do we have that Mathematica and Maple and Axiom don't have and vice
> versa?  The most obvious thing we have that Mat and Map don't have is $0
> price.  Compared to Axiom, we are apparently easier to use and in
> general more pragmatic and less pure.

I think this is all true. Richard said, that Axiom was slow. While I'm not
to sure about this (Aldor - the language of Axiom claims to be as speedy
as C is), I'm pretty sure that maxima can be made *very* fast.  Simply
monitor your code (this should be possible with metering.lisp), take out
the slow bits and rewrite them in lisp. Done. As far as I know,
Mathematica, Maple, Mupad, Axiom... cannot do this in such an integrated
fashion.

There is another thing I like about the "lispiness" of maxima: I wrote 
that graph package for maxima and - alas - it's also a package for 
lisp-only users!

> What group of users can we serve better than them?  Do we want to
> present ourselves as the best solution for undergraduate physics
> teaching (maybe)?  For researchers in pure math (probably not)?  For
> light users of CAS (maybe)?  For Linux hackers?  etc.

I do "pure" math and I think that Maxima is good if I need speed. (in this 
case I write lisp code and run it from within maxima to continue). For 
the other stuff (at the moment asymptotics) I use maxima, maple and 
(sometimes) mathematica and compare the results. Often they differ :-(

I do not know yet what I will do when axiom is finally working. My problem
is that I like hacking maxima too much so that it starts to be a handicap 
for my mathematical career...

Thank you all,

Martin

By the way:  

x I think that one of the most important groups are those who post to the
list right now.

x I think that posters on math.* should immediately be forwarded to our
list (by us of course), as I did sometimes in the past already. I think we
should gather our audience here - its easier to keep in touch that way.