I wanted to make a couple points in favor of commercializing Smath:

1. Many companies would not look favorably on their engineers using free software for their calculations and they certainly wouldn't make a free software solution the standard for their entire engineering department.

2. Charging a modest price for Smath would allow the developers to put in the time and resources to truly make Smath the best it could be.

Free is good for individual and academic users, but on the corporate level, engineering managers desire to invest money in practical solutions and receive a commensurate level of quality.

Will

From my previous post, you will see that I actually agree with your point from the perspective of marketing. The developers should try to innovate and should market their future product by emphasizing what makes their product better than and different from their competitor. But, my point is that they must make sure, in doing so, that they preserve the functionality that makes SMath a useful tool.

I think that they need to include the best that MathCad has to offer, avoid the shortcomings of MathCad, be creative and original in how they achieve that functionality, and then move beyond MathCad in the area of new functionality and capabilities.

P.S.
Another thought, although I am no expert in this area, if the developers did commercialize SMath at some point in the future, I would think that there may be copyright issues if the interface too closely resembles MathCad.

Edited by user 18 February 2010 04:32:01(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified

There is nothing wrong that MathCAD will take over SMath (the more stronger should win), but we can take the following customer lessons from the predicted events.

Due to SMath simulated MathCAD in most of the cases, there following pitfalls for the SMath users in future:
- MathCAD, just from economical reasons (they have a huge customer base and they need to keep they obligation to them), will continue to support its initial solutions. In other words, SMath (at least its desktop and live versions) will be forgotten;
- users that use pure SMath specific features will be forced to port / translate their work to the corresponding MathCAD features (if they exist, of course);
- users, who based their business solutions on the SMath, will suddenly discovery that they have lost their key software provider (the more they invest in SMath, the more they are going to lose);
- and this is the better what can happen, the worth will be if SMath will just disappear from the market. Just lose to MathCAD, for example (never think of your competitors from the viewpoint you please).

Just imagine, SMath started to emphasize on its differences, then even if MathCAD (or anybody else) will swallow SMath there will no problems. Just to clarify:
- MathCAD and SMath are no longer competitors, though if MathCAD will even buy SMath it will continue to advance this solution and support SMath users;
- it might be even better (be bought by a company with large user base), because SMath will immediately obtain the largest auditory it can even imagine now;
- users, that used SMath specific solutions for a long time will be recognized as a most advanced and foresighted ones (how do you like it?);
- old SMath users will be greatly rewarded for their faithfulness, by having much more features in a shorter time;
- SMath prices will be definitely decreased, just because the new company will try to extend the customer base;
- and at the end, at last, SMath guys can have 7 million USD (instead of 3), because they have en-powered this company, because they discover a new place in the market, because they can promote and market they product properly.

Now, do not start to blame me as a MathCAD spy or supporter .
If you do, then you do understand nothing

Thank you Andrey for the prompt and clear answer, I really appreciate it. And please, apologize me if I made something wrong by wandering about with my stupid questions. I am a marketer ( at least part of my soul )

I have recently discovered SMath Studio, and I am very excited to see some excellent work being done on a software solution designed to perform and document engineering calculations. I am a Mechanical Engineering professor who uses MathCAD every day, largely as an instructional tool (but I also use it for projects). While I really like MathCAD, I have grown frustrated that they have not offered versions for android or for linux. I am also frustrated by the fact that its price is so high for non-academic entities. I would like to be able to tell my students that it is used pervasively in industry and at engineering firms, but I know that is not really the case (perhaps because of cost). If the right set of functionality eventually appears in SMath Studio, I would have no problem campaigning for our institution to begin using it instead of MathCAD. If a lot of engineering schools make the switch, then the marketing issue could become insignificant since the emerging engineering workforce would be aware of a free tool (or even if it was not free, but inexpensive) at their disposal to do the documentation that they need to do.

That's just my two cents. And by the way, I think maweilian's points are spot-on, and it may just be a language barrier issue, but I do not always understand what alexey's points are. Much thanks to Andrey for the donation of his time and soul to the development of this exciting tool.

Thanks for the reply, Radovan. You are absolutely right that for a project such as this one (basically one person working on it in his spare time), it is developing quite rapidly. I have read quite a few posts in the forum and have noted an early comment you made about wanting something like the solve block. I believe Andrey's response was that he felt like that might take quite a while to implement a feature like that. Have you found a workaround? I need a way to solve multiple non-linear equations without a lot of extra work.

What an absolute 'lode that companies wont use software because it's free! Take a look around the world and then come back. If company usage is the goal (which I don't necessarily think it seems to be), any company worth its salt will review and decide on SMath based on its QUALITY (etc.), not its price. I cannot believe that there are still people out there who think that Free = Worthless , it is an extremely antiquated train of thought.

Perhaps Andrey actually develops this application (his baby) because he really enjoys programming and not for possible monetary gain. What about the satisfaction of giving this powerful tool away to users and watch them solve complicated problems.
Theres a lot of reasons for a person to create great things, and money is but a fraction of that drive.

Hello Greg,

I think this would note be so simple. Actually, I would not mind using SMath as a front end to, say, Octave or some other free computational engines. Contrary, it would be great - but I am not sure this could be possible at the moment due to SMath's way of working. I can not explain this and might be wrong, this is just my feeling. I suppose Andrey could explain this more precisely and in more details.

Regards,
Radovan

Hi everyone!

This is a great job I'd like to congratulate. As many of you I'm a long time mathcad user and "fanatic" (since version 2 as I remember, for DOS, and I've been looking around fow a while for something similar to mcad but free)... And now, I finally found SMath (a few minutes ago I have to confess).

I use to import data from other programs (reading txt files into matrix), like LTSPICE (a good circuit simulator software, free too), or waveforms captured from soundcard acting as an oscilloscope (with programs like audiotester) to filter, analyze and process with Mathcad, and I haven't found this feature yet in SMath, but I'm just starting to know it!

I also have developed, using programming palette in mathcad, a customized library of functions well suited to evaluate my electronic engineering students (at Universidad Distrital Francisco Jose de Caldas, Bogota-Colombia). Nothing new, but I started this work because I couldn't find quiz generator software with the ability to generate random data as distractors in multiple choice quiestions based on complex (complicated) calculations (like those coming from transmission line equations involving trigonometric hyperbolic functions on complex numbers), without having to develop my own scripts in PHP, PERL or similar. Things to probe with SMath!

Recently I'm working in analyzing linear electric circuits by graphical methods, from obtaining and combining i vs v characteristics (XY plots)... I'm gonna start using SMath for this purpose right now!

I'm not a programmer (except for embedded applications in assembly language or C specially for PIC microcontrollers) but if there is something I can do for SMath project, just let me know, I'd love to collaborate!

And my comment about the new stuff that should include SMath, well, I believe that web, portable and handheld versions of this interesting application, as I have noticed, are pretty good innovations, far away from what PTC's Mathcad has done in this sense till now (and that Mathsoft's would have done better I guess).

Best regards

Francisco Zamora
fzamora@udistrital.edu.co
Assistant Professor
Universidad Distrital FJC
Bogota Colombia

Edited by user 15 September 2010 16:10:10(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified

I think PTC only cares about high profit margins from large corporations. As a student, they do not want to bother with me. Oh why did MathSoft ever sell out.

From what I have read, Mathematica offers a $300 home edition and has a vision that people should focus on the math and not get bogged down in solving the problem. The $300 price tag kills Mathematicas vision. It also does not have an intuitive interface unless you are an acedemic.

I too believe in Mathematicas vision but I can't afford it.
Here is a link to it.
http://www.ted.com/talks...math_with_computers.html

Note that you do not see the user interface in this video, just a lot of gee wiz entertainment graphics

The big draw to MathCAD and SMath is the whiteboard type interface where I can insert pictures, diagrams and text boxes to explain what the calculation is about. All the other software requires you to work with equations in programing format which is very error prone and unintuitive especially for quality assurance purposes. I think I just repeated one of MathCADS sales white papers but lets face it, Mathsoft, the creators of MathCAD got it right when they created the program!

I think Andrey is doing the right thing with his programing here. I cannot think of any way to improve the user interface. Standard Mathematical Notation on a whiteboard interface is very powerful.

I can see the possibilities of giving a little kid SMath and some instruction.
I can see where SMath should be included in office software products to work alongside if not eventually incorporating spreadsheets.

I think the world would be different if SMath becomes as commonplace as word processors.