How long before R overtakes SAS and SPSS?

Based on an analysis of Google Scholar data on usage of statistical software, Bob Muenchen makes a forecast: R will overtake SAS and SPSS in 2015. Forecasting is extrapolation — always a tricky business — so Bob also provides these qualitative reasons why R will continue to grow at the expense of SAS and SPSS:

• The continued rapid growth in add-on packages (Figure 10)
• The attraction of R’s powerful language
• The near monopoly R has on the latest analytic methods
• Its free price
• The freedom to teach with real-world examples from outside organizations, which is forbidden to academics by SAS and SPSS licenses (it benefits those organizations, so the vendors say they should have their own software license).

See how Bob comes up with this forecast (using R, of course!) at the link below.

r4stats.com: Will 2015 be the Beginning of the End for SAS and SPSS?

Comments

[Wouter]

R could easily overtake SPSS if there would be a usable GUI similar to SPSS. RStudio goes a long way in making R more usable, and there are a few more programs/packages that provide some functionality, but no single usable program that provides most basic functionality that SPSS provides.

[Sean Flanigan]

I learned SPSS to get out of school, SAS to earn a living, and R because I love what I do. I'm still working on the social skills...is there a package for that?

[Brian]

I don't think SAS is too worried. The company is expanding into other areas of information management with potentially higher growth rates (ETL, Data Quality, Master Data Management, Data Visualization, High Performance - Hardware Accelerators, etc.)

The big question is what happens to the company when the current owner who is 70 dies/retires/wants to sell. Will the then owners be able to keep the company together and what will their strategic direction take?