Poll is CLOSED
Poll
What would increase usage of MATLAB in the professional (scientific/industrial, non-student) world?
More advertising or sympos. exhibit
3%
More media mentions (news segments)
3%
Adjust pricing
59%
Sponsor research & publications
11%
Boost university involvement
21%
Something else (list in comments)
4%
1076 votes
38 Comments
matlab should be supported for personal home version use in China and The price should be in line with Chinese economic conditions,This is a huge market
Matlab should be free for non-commercial use!
This way people become familiar with the product and also use it professionally.
We are a small company and I am the only (not-fulltime ..) programmer. So, I am in need of professional, reliable SW to minimize the waste of time by some stupid bug fixing. That's why I prefer matlab over python. However, with the recent "explosion" of toolboxes (with a sometimes annoying distribution of functionalities) and each a minimum of 1k bugs (plus annual subscription fees), things become too expensive for us. Several of our customers started moving to python, so, at the moment, I feel like being undefinite about what to do in the future. Here, a change in policy would help a lot, a further increase in diversity and pricing will surely kick me out, sorry.
Publication to universities within G20 country-below scope (ASEAN will be good), with some discounts for matlab and certification, so indirectly some companies will look up more about useing the apps.
From a neuroscience perspective:
People often say that Python makes sharing research code easier / more accessible to a wider audience, but this is only true in some ways. Getting research code shared in the form of Python packages to ACTUALLY WORK can be a struggle. Also, documentation of Python packages in other languages than English is often spotty.
So if I were advertising MatLab to researchers, I'd say "MATLAB: It just works."
Offering free courses to the corporate world would help a lot. After all, there are many of us engineers who had our Masters degrees before MATLAB was invented, plus, as other have mentioned, the engineers who graduated from schools where it wasn't offered.
Boosting University involvement is necessary in developing countries like India. In most Indian Universities majority of the engineering students do not use MATLAB for designing their projects. Most of them do not even have an idea how much MATLAB can help in their projects.
Start indexing at 0, like every other language
MATLAB is very popular in both industy and academia but when it comes to reseaearch projects in instatitutins and colleges, even though MATLAB consists of wide variety of tools, the students and faculties generally prefer Open sourced softwares, because its generally harder to obtain genuine licence for MATLAB because of its pricing. If there was certain level of open source aspect to MATLAB or lowered pricing then by my estimate the usage of MATLAB in industry and scienifc research would shoot up drastically.
Properly reduce the price of the software is conducive to the benign and sustainable development of the software, I am a personal fan of more than 10 years, living in China, for commercial use offer, it is too expensive, so I want to use the home version, but why has not supported matlab China home version to buy? I hope TMW will consider the purchasing power of ordinary Chinese people!
As long as MATLAB is not free, it will never come close to catching up with Python, it's as simple as that, I think.
Make research licence accessable with student's own laptop too. My university has research license but that can be used only in lab computer and I cannot install it on mine. I want t be able to work online at home.
One of the things I always thought was missing in MathWorks pricing strategy on commercial licenses was a way of scaling the price according to business size. Obviously, small businesses are going to find the price of MATLAB significantly more of an encumbrance than large companies, and are more likely to turn to free alternatives.
Oh that's easy, and there are lots of different ways. The only hard part might be making sure that it can't be legally classified as bribery.
Industry and academic is becoming increasingly hostile to any product that is not Free And Open Source. If the goal is to increase MATLAB use beyond any other goal, it needs to be made FOSS.
There is a hypothesis from some people that making MATLAB FOSS would somehow ensure that MATLAB would thrive and be high-quality indefinitely. Masses of people would, hypothetically, invest countless volunteer hours into enhancing and maintaining the software.
It's a hypothesis. Other people have doubts about the accuracy of the hypothesis.
Develop some courses for the industry from the universities
Well, I feel MATLAB got quite a good following and fame. MATLAB is popular in academia and with students.
In my opinion
(i) Adjusting the pricing would gather more mass. Pricing can be linked with one's contribution to research and publications using MATLAB. If an individual publishes a research article using MATLAB, give them a discount.
(ii) Most people think MATLAB is slow; due to their limited knowledge of MATLAB coding. This misconception should be eliminated by conducting workshops, especially at the student level.
(iii) Highlight the MATLAB parallel computing capabilities.
(iv) Conduct more workshops showcasing MATLAB success stories and pointing out how easy coding in MATLAB is and how effective a problem can be coded in MATLAB.
(V) Conduct hackathons at the student level and scientific contribution level.
(vi) Sponsor research. Pick the researchers and let them showcase their work and how MATLAB made their life easy.
(vii) List all the publications (published work using MATLAB everywhere) on the MathWorks page.
(viii) Invite researchers and conduct MATLAB alone symposia.
Link to all polls: Polls
For #1 I was thinking of web, and print advertising as well as appearing at more trade shows and scientific symposia. This could also include some MATLAB-only symposia like the Mathworks hosted symposium this month where everyone was invited to attend.
For #2 I was thinking of perhaps contacting local and national news networks with some cool new scientific discovery where they used MATLAB to show the public the power of MATLAB.
For #3, anything specific, other than just "make it free or cheaper"? Be creative in your suggestion.
For #4 I was thinking of funding specific research if that research would use MATLAB and publish it.
For #5 I was thinking of increasing the proactive involvement of Mathworks in universities to get the students hooked on MATLAB so that they continue to use it after they graduate from the university and get a real job.