pointer to comments re Paul Murrell's new book, R, & SAS on Andrew Gelman's blog

There are some interesting comments re Paul Murrell's new book, R, & SAS 
on Andrew Gelman's blog:

http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2005/04/a_new_book_on_r.html 

I found the comments quite interesting.  I also find it somewhat amusing 
when people speculate on what is necessary "if R truly wanted to compete 
in that space".  R doesn't "compete" with commercial software.  As our 
co-founder and resident sage, Ross Ihaka, characterizes our approach, 
"We have a simple 'marketing strategy' - we put the software out there 
for you to use.  If you decide to use it, that's great.  If not, that's 
ok too."

Douglas Bates <bates at stat.wisc.edu> writes:

Tony Plate wrote:

There are some interesting comments re Paul Murrell's new book, R, &
SAS on Andrew Gelman's blog:
http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2005/04/a_new_book_on_r.html

I found the comments quite interesting.  I also find it somewhat
amusing when people speculate on what is necessary "if R truly wanted
to compete in that space".  R doesn't "compete" with commercial
software.  As our co-founder and resident sage, Ross Ihaka,
characterizes our approach, "We have a simple 'marketing strategy' -
we put the software out there for you to use.  If you decide to use
it, that's great.  If not, that's ok too."

Just to prevent misattribution: Notice that this is from the comments
*to* Andrew Gelman's note, not comments *by* A.G.

(And at least some of us do think about the market requirements from
time to time. I agree with Ross that we can afford to try to do it
right rather than be driven by marketing, though.)

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