Poll: Half of SAS users considering a switch

A recent poll of KD Nuggets readers suggests that of those using SAS today, almost half (49.6%) are considering switching to a different system for statistical analysis.

The poll was prompted by the recent high court decision in the UK, that affirmed that "WPS is lawful clone of SAS system" (as stated in a WPS press release). The exact poll question was, "Are you a current SAS user and are you considering a switch, in light of a recent WPS court victory vs SAS?". The poll also allowed respondents to indicate one or more solutions they're considering switching to, with the following responses:

• 58.6% to WPS
• 32.8% to R
• 27.6% to other systems

KD Nuggets Polls: Switching from SAS to WPS, R, ...

Comments

[Yihui]

Web surveys can be extremely biased, because you have no additional information about your respondents (e.g. not likely to be a random sample); meanwhile, I believe it is a good practice to report the sample size when quoting a percentage from a survey -- you could also say "half of respondents considered switching to different software" when there were actually two respondents in total and one of them considered a switch. Personally I hate Newspaper-like titles...

Anyway, I'm happy to see the victory of WPS against (the proud) SAS.

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Update:

Hahh!!! Another possibility to get biased samples in web: I was not able to post the comment under Firefox 3.6.8 (Ubuntu) until I switched to Google Chrome! The 'Post' button was disabled no matter what I filled in. What if I don't have Chrome installed?

[David Smith]

Thanks for letting me know about the posting problem Yihui. This blog is run by Typepad, I'll see if they have a solution about the Firefox/Ubuntu issue.

[Paul]

surprising results...and I agree that it would be a good idea to disclose survey details. The online tool SoGoSurvey has good features and an impressive survey bank.