

IBM acquires SPSS - gtzi
http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/27936.wss

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drubio
Interesting how even the word 'acquires' is different with IBM. SPSS is in
analytics software, but its a 41 year-old company.

Its unlikely its founders 'planned' their exit strategy when they started. I
also don't think I will see Google or even Microsoft 'acquire' a 20+ year old
company, let alone a 40+ year old one.

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blasdel
Isn't SPSS the very first independently sold commercial software package?

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olihb
IBM, please fix their software, it crashes all the time, the new versions of
SPSS are slow, the charts are ugly as hell and the file formats are not open.

It would be the best thing in the world if they could open source it, but I'm
not holding my breath. I guess I could learn R, but old habits die hard...

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derwiki
You're putting a lot of faith into IBM as far as user experience goes. You, my
friend, have apparently never used Lotus Notes.

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olihb
My only exposure to IBM products were their Thinkpads and the various open
source they contributed to.

I heard about Lotus Notes, they say it's the hell-spawn of a whore and a
prostitute.

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whyleyc
Internally we prefer to refer to it as "Bloatus Goats" :)

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neovive
Interesting. I always thought IBM would invest more into the R project which
would seem more synergistic with their Linux strategy.

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gaius
Their "Linux strategy" is to sell hardware and consulting. In fact at IBM that
is just called "strategy".

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a2tech
Maybe IBM will fix the ridiculous licensing situation with SPSS... Ehh this is
IBM I'm sure they'll make it worse

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trevelyan
I reversed engineered their data files back in grad school while studying
statistics. They were coded in base-three. I never figured out why.

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gtzi
found via @monkchips on twitter

