SAS (pronounced "sass") once stood for "statistical analysis system," and began at North Carolina State University as a project to analyze agricultural research. As demand for such software grew, SAS was founded in 1976 to help all sorts of customers - from pharmaceutical companies and banks to academic and governmental entities.
SAS – both the software and company – thrived throughout the next few decades. Development of the software attained new heights in the industry by being able to run across all platforms, using the multivendor architecture for which it is known today. While the scope of the company spread across the globe, the encouraging and innovative corporate culture remained the same.
Explore each era of company history through various photos and descriptions of how SAS came to be.
Pradeep Joshi
--Dear Friends,
Individual approach to data analysis and mining software tools appears to be weird at times. I am a management teacher, it is my observation that; a typical user behavior is very hard to assess (for I also wrote few papers on user perception and attitude to open source software). Sometime ahead I taught consumer behavior to MBA students, and I used to say students that the advantage of studying consumer behavior is not only to understand consumer behavior but also remain ourselves to be rational in consumption.
As far as, these statistical software tools are concerned, at times, I feel that we are not rational in our approach to the same. For suppose, there are umpteen number of open source tools available, few of them are much powerful than their proprietary counterparts. In spite of the fact, we are keener of using this proprietary software. We don't mind cracking or finding alternative means of procuring keys illegally and using them than choosing free tools. Is it not unethical in a typical academic environment? How long can we sell our souls doing these charades at academics? (Sorry if I am harsh) Additionally, there are individuals (It is my personal experience), who explain how efficient they are cracking these at work.
I personally (only and purely my personal observation, nothing to attribute it to anybody) observe that this is happening only due to bandwagon effect, which means, it is only the effect created due to apprehensive reservation that someone is talking about something , anyway, I don't know about it, so let me pretend that I know something about the same.
OK, now coming to the facts, R can be one of the best software which is not mere statistical computing software but a "research management system"; there are individuals at west who point their rifle at those who vie with this thought. Of course they have reasons to say. Many times we find people compare R and SAS (for both of them are programming languages having their own compilers in themselves). I firmly believe that it is difficult to compare R with SAS, but there are views and reviews that rebuke power of SAS over R. One of the common features is that the both of them are programming languages (perhaps R is better and reasonable to study and understand). For instance, a user can play around his objects (created though functions in R) much better than in SAS. A typical SAS function takes a page long routine to create a simple calculation, which is not the case in R (perhaps I can say it is entirely opposite in R).
There are thousands of add-ons for R; all of them completely free (have a look at http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/available_packages_by_name.html). Suppose if I am to do a simple CFA, neural networks, social network analysis (SNA) using SPSS or SAS, each one of them a separate price tag to buy (in addition to initial acquisition cost), but all of them are entirely free in R. R is not only for present but also for future. For instance, you can get few insights from here: http://r4stats.com/articles/popularity/
Most importantly, behind SAS there is profit making company, but behind R there is community (research, academic, industry, software developers, users and etc.), this community is much stronger than employees working in SAS. Getting help in R is a matter of a mail to a friend (community). Please have a look at https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help or at http://www.r-project.org/mail.html, but in SAS is matter of spending money, getting licenses, raising tokens, finally knowing nothing).
SAS is only a statistical computing system, but R is Research Management System (RMS), for it has many options for report generation (for that matter I shall say there are statistical packages native in R and they have in-built options for report generation). R integrates uncompromisingly with LaTex (http://www.latex-project.org/).
I firmly believe that R is for ethical and reasonable beings like us ....ACADEMICIANS, as Tobias Oetiker said aptly that Windows is for those who sold their souls, hence, my dear friends, let us not sell our souls by using anything other than R!
Warm Regards!
______________
MTC GLOBAL- Educate, Empower, Elevate
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