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I have no doubt that a lot of RD goes into these products. But, it seems as though this pricing structure helps to give people a rationalization to crack and pirate software. The same goes for pricey software from Adobe, SPSS, and Microsoft.
There must be a way to broaden the market to still meet profit margins and recoup investments.
I'm sure others will disagree, thats fine. IMHO only.

The pricing appears high, but the market for this type of software is very small (ie. specialized researchers in R&D fields including biology, geology, financials, etc.). If the price were $100/copy the volume would probably only go up slightly. With that said Wolfram has an excellent pricing program for students and educational institutions. Furthermore they have an incredible website that offers a lot of information and demos for free.

I run a one person geologic consulting service and have wanted a copy of this for a long time but cannot justify the price ( I gave up pirating software when I could comfortably feed myself on my own). I plan on taking some classes this summer which I hope will qualify me for the educational discount. The software is just amazing! (I have no financial interests or ties what so ever to Wolfram).

Re pricing: Mathematica is a professional tool. As such its price is pretty reasonable. Compare to CPLEX which costs $3000 but only covers the optimization capabilities of Mathematica, SAS which costs $4000 but only does statistics or Matlab which costs $2500 just for the language and matrix capabilities plus $1000 each for toolboxes like optimization, fitting, symbolics etc to build it into a system closer to Mathematica.
Also, most good technical universities have site licenses, making it free to the staff and students.

I disagree. You have to pay this fee EACH YEAR, or your executable will cease to function.
AND...R is free, has very high functionality, is user extensible, and has a large catalog of (free) user extensions.
Mathematica is wonderful, but I and my colleagues have stopped using it because of the cost--especially in comparison with R.

Actually, if you have a professional license (which is the $2500 price) your license is persistent and will not expire. Persistence may not be true for student licenses; however, as of a few years ago, those were very inexpensive - a couple of pitchers of beer. ;-)

Free is good; however, sometimes you get what you pay for. There is an incredible range of capabilities in Mma and (once you get past the bodacious learning curve of thinking different) it is possible to very quickly and efficiently pull together sophisticated systems. In an industrial environment where delivery time is critical and people time is the the driver for project costs, Mma has a pretty big cost-benefit ratio.

Sometimes, of course, you don't get what you pay for. Over the years I've spent over $100K on MATLAB licenses but most of those have since been deprecated given that MATLAB is less capable as well as more expensive to get to a functional system since they don't follow the WRI model of integrating new capabilities into the core product so many toolboxes must also be purchased. (If I developed DSP or control systems, MATLAB might be worth it; however, my emphasis is data modeling and systems development.)

Even though commercial version is around $2500, it comes with one year subscription, one copy you can use with your work computer, and also one complementary copy that you can install on your home computer. Note that the home-copy is valid as long as you are on subscription (whereas the work-copy license is yours forever)
bulent

I think it goes back to the very basic question, what are you doing with the software? It is not much an issue with the price and cost because most of the research institutions have site license or discount. Indeed that's the targeted market for Mathematica and Matlab. The mathematica vs. matlab war is like the PC vs. Mac war. It depends on what you are doing. I have tried both software, but found works can be easily done with Matlab (numerical analysis, and matrix manipulations), so I go with Matlab. My friend was doing symbolic modeling, I suggested he should switch to Mathematica from Matlab, and he is liking Mathematica right now. There is this one thing that I just wish matlab can learn from Mathematica, the data representation in matlab is not as good.

I've owned a couple of licenses for Mathematica over the years, but when they would not let me transfer from OS 9 to OS X, for anything less than full price, I quit using the app. The strange thing is, I was able to transfer across hardware platforms NeXT->Windows->Mac, but not across OSes on the same computer. How unfortunate. As well, it seems the non-educational users are subsidizing the educational prices. How about something for the casual user?

It's true that Mathematica used to be too pricey for individual use - but they just started offering a Home Edition version for single users, non-commercial - now it's like $250 a copy - much more affordable.

just introduced single user license for individual, hobbyist or non-commercial users - i don't think this price will be around for long...

here's the page:

http://www.wolfram.c...icahomeedition/