Richard (Petti),
Thanks for making your analysis of the Macsyma saga available to this
list, which confirms my "impression that Mathematica's success comes as
much from Macsyma's marketing errors as from Mathematica's marketing
triumphs."
I have a few specific followup questions for you and others on the list.
> ...Symbolics ... initially impeded the contractually required
> ports of Macsyma to other types of workstations.
When exactly were the various systems (Macsyma, Mathematica, Maple,
Reduce/Axiom) released commercially on various platforms: Tops-20
(PDP-10), Lisp Machine, Sun, Apollo, HPUX, VAX, Next, Mac, MSDOS,
Windows, etc.?
> the Macsyma group lacked business leadership
A chronology of who led the Macsyma group, and what the headcount of its
engineering and marketing/sales staff were at various times would be
helpful. What was the pricing strategy of the various companies?
> some government agencies, notably the Department of Energy and the
> national labs, refuse to buy from Symbolics, and began pouring
> significant resources into an alternative government version
> of Macsyma, called 'DOE Macsyma.'
Did they refuse to buy Macsyma from Symbolics, or did Symbolics not
provide Macsyma on suitable platforms?
Was there actually a large group of users of DOE Macsyma? What were the
'significant resources' being poured into it? What was done with those
resources -- only *use* or also *development*? If there was development
investment in DOE Macsyma, what happened to it? As far as I know, the
codebase for Schelter's Maxima was 1982 DOE Maxima, with porting
contributions from Fateman's Berkeley group and ... what else?
> Macsyma's market share in symbolic math software had fallen
> from 70% in 1987 to 1% in 1992. While the market was growing fast,
> Macsyma sales in 1991 and early 1992 were falling.
Very interesting facts! That is a stunning fall in market share for
Macsyma. Are you at liberty to publish the full time series for the
overall CAS market, and various vendors' market share?
> So we spent virtually nothing on marketing during the year
> after we achieved the greatest level of product superiority.
Very sad!
-s