{"id":3742,"date":"2013-11-20T05:11:28","date_gmt":"2013-11-20T10:11:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/?p=3742"},"modified":"2013-11-20T05:11:28","modified_gmt":"2013-11-20T10:11:28","slug":"web-editor-may-save-sas-from-going-the-way-of-cobol","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/web-editor-may-save-sas-from-going-the-way-of-cobol\/","title":{"rendered":"Web Editor May Save SAS from Going the Way of COBOL"},"content":{"rendered":"

I am old. I remember punched cards, COBOL, dumb terminals and having to walk over to the computer center and load tapes on to the drive if I wanted to use large data sets – large back then meaning 100,000 records or more with a few hundred variables. We thought that was pretty big data.<\/p>\n

By the time I finished graduate school in 1990, almost everyone I knew who still programmed using COBOL was over 40. They had learned it in college, or picked it up somewhere along the line and stuck with it. I didn’t know anyone who was learning<\/em> COBOL. It was pretty clearly on the way out. Java, C++ , PHP, Perl and javascript were all taking up the attention of the cool kids on the block. SAS was a relatively new, cool thing if you were into statistics, while BMDP was on the way out. BMDP – that was another thing no one under 40 seemed to use.<\/p>\n

So …. when I went to the Western Users of SAS Software conference this year, I was struck by the fact that I seemed to be about the median age. There were A LOT of people older than me. Most of the younger people were the student scholarship winners and junior professional award winners.<\/p>\n

This does not bode well for SAS, and it made me a bit sad, because as I said in a prior post, the model selection procedures were cool<\/a>, from a statistical perspective, there is a lot of good stuff from SAS.<\/p>\n

I used to go to the user group meetings and they would give you a book (yes, on paper, children) that had macros written by SAS users. I think that was the first time I saw the parallel analysis criterion code for factor analysis – a macro I used in my dissertation and in one of the first articles I published.<\/p>\n

Tonight, I was looking for a way to do power analysis for a repeated measures ANCOVA and I could not find it for SAS, neither using PROC POWER, PROC GLMPOWER nor any user-written macros. It may exist – I looked several other places as well, found a paper on how to do it using SPSS syntax (although that code did not work!) and someone else wrote a procedure in R that I didn’t try.<\/p>\n

SAS used to be the place for the cutting edge. What happened?<\/p>\n

One reason is that everyone used to use either SAS or SPSS at universities and that isn’t the case any more. A second is that SAS is really expensive, so universities who do not have a license aren’t inclined to get one.<\/p>\n

This all sounds like the death knell is tolling for SAS and it is just a matter of time until it follows COBOL and Blackberry as one of those things that people ask, “Why are you using that<\/em>?”<\/p>\n

I think there is still some possibility for SAS to turn things around – although whether they will or not remains to be seen.<\/p>\n

The smartest thing SAS has done in years is to come out with SAS On-Demand for Academics. This makes SAS free for university students and professors. It’s perfect for on-line courses because you can upload your data to the class website and all of your students can access it.<\/p>\n

Now the next thing SAS needs to do is start making that available at a reasonable cost once students graduate. Instead of charging them thousands of dollars a year for a license, they can charge $50 a month like Adobe does for its design package or Google does for its apps. (Yes, Google apps for business are cheaper than $50 a month but they don’t do all that much.)<\/p>\n

New graduates aren’t going to pay several thousand dollars for a license because they don’t have that kind of money. They might shell out $50 plus occasional extra charges to access some high performance computing capabilities.<\/p>\n

SAS already has millions of lines of code and tens of thousands of pages of good documentation. It’s some good stuff.<\/p>\n

Think about this – years ago, the Mac was considered a better computer than Windows but over-priced. Many people thought Apple would go under. Instead, they came out with the iPhone and the iPad and they are wildly successful.<\/p>\n

The Web Editor and other cloud products could become the SAS version of the iPad.<\/p>\n

Here’s to hoping they don’t fuck it up.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I am old. I remember punched cards, COBOL, dumb terminals and having to walk over to the computer center and load tapes on to the drive if I wanted to use large data sets – large back then meaning 100,000 records or more with a few hundred variables. We thought that was pretty big data….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3742","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-software","category-technology"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3742","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3742"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3742\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3743,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3742\/revisions\/3743"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3742"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3742"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3742"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}