Will Wolfram Alpha negatively affect Mathematica sales?

May 14th, 2009 | Categories: mathematica, Wolfram Alpha | Tags:

The Wolfram alpha blog has posted a set of Wolfram Alpha examples where it does some pretty complicated mathematics.  For example it can calculate the eigenvalues and eigenvectors of a 3×3 symbolic matrix – just the sort of thing you might turn to Mathematica for.

In another example it shows the result of a symbolic integral (which Mathematica can do) and it gives the steps that a human would need to do to get the same result (which Mathematica can’t do).

I know that Mathematica can do inifnitely more than one-liner calculations such as these but it makes me wonder.  Will there be less call for the new, cheap(er) home editition of Mathematica once Wolfram Alpha goes live?

  1. May 15th, 2009 at 12:21
    Reply | Quote | #1

    On the contrary, I think the release of Alpha will be great for sales of Mathematica. Once I get used to playing with correlations and graphs with the public data in Alpha, I’ll want to do similar things with my own data.

  2. Mike Croucher
    May 15th, 2009 at 12:30
    Reply | Quote | #2

    Good point! Cheers Jesse.