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http://www.macnn.com/articles/01/10/31/sas.has/

SAS has no plans for OS X development

updated 02:55 pm EST, Wed October 31, 2001

 
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James Strickland forwarded an email from SAS Technical support that notes the company is not currently developing its products for OS X: "At this point in time, there are no plans to continue development of the SAS software for Macintosh, even though OS X is a Unix-like operating system. However, we have folks here at SAS monitoring requests we receive to have SAS running on OS X." A FAQ on the Website says that "there will not be a carbon-compliant version of SAS for Mac OS X."


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  1. jared.williams

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    10/31, 04:40pm | report spam | Reply | delete

    I would be concerned...

    ...if I even knew what SAS is. MacNN, not everyone is a know-it-all. Can you at least give a quick overview of the company you are referring to?

    Thanks

  1. Joined:

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    10/31, 04:54pm | report spam | Reply | delete

    Link

    www.sas.com

  1. geekstud

    Junior Member

    Joined: Feb 2001

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    10/31, 05:01pm | report spam | Reply |

    Loser Company/Product

    The various products in the SAS line are often full of bugs and perform like a pig in the mud. The technology is old and the codebase no doubt bloated. And the license fees for serious computers - oy! About the only reason they've thrived is because SAS is "validated" for use by pharma companies on drug research and submission. There are much faster and better products available.

  1. gregforcey

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    10/31, 05:03pm | report spam | Reply | delete

    The SAS System

    The SAS system is a high-powered statistics/data manipulation program. It is probably the most powerful statistics program available, however one must have knowledge of the program language to use it. Unfortunately development for the SAS system for the Macintosh ceased in 1996.

    SAS also makes JMP which is a statistical program with a nice GUI.

  1. strobe

    Dedicated MacNNer

    Joined: Oct 1999

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    10/31, 06:38pm | report spam | Reply |

    thing is..

    SAS for windows is the absolute worst application ever sold in the history of mankind. Its interface is so friggin hideous you *have* to use a combination of right click and modifier keys to do some things!

  1. Joined:

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    10/31, 07:20pm | report spam | Reply | delete

    StatView is nice

    I personally like StatView (which is made by SAS) for basic statistical analyses. I found this, old article about their commitment for Mac OS X:

    http://www.sas.com/service/news/feature/15jan01/statview.html

    I guess when they released that article they were committed. I encourage everyone to send them an email asking them to support OS X. In the meanwhile, anyone have any recommendations for good statistical software?

  1. SteveBoker

    Fresh-Faced Recruit

    Joined: May 2001

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    10/31, 08:18pm | report spam | Reply |

    SAS support would be a bi

    I'm a professor at Notre Dame. I teach statistics. I use OS X (and before that NeXT) on a daily basis to get my work done.

    Yeah, I too know SAS. SAS is a dinosaur from the 1960's for goodness sake. I hate it and don't use it any more than absolutely necessary. On the other hand, I'm teaching it in my Multivariate Statistics course this week because in order to get a job, students _must_ know how to use it. SAS is one of the 4 absolutely positively necessary applications for university research and teaching use. The lack of support from SAS, SPSS, Matlab and Gauss contribute more to the lack of sales of Macs in universities than any other cause. I'd include Splus too, but now there is a nice open source alternative called R that runs on OS X. I know that other alternatives exist to get your work done, but we professors have to prepare the students for the current work environment. Sure I hate SAS and I don't use it in my own research, but if I didn't teach it my students would be less employable. Sad fact of life.

    Believe me, if university IT people could consolidate their Suns and Windows boxes into one architecture, they'd go for it. But without the "big 4" of research, they just can't do it. They're responsible to the tuition paying students just like we professors are. All the "big 4" packages run both on Windows and Solaris. Because they don't run on Macs, Macs are considered to be "toys". I know it's unfair, awful, illogical, etc. But it doesn't matter how much you howl, this is a force of nature like the moon and the tides. Until Apple wakes up and induces these four developers to port to OS X (which would in each case be an utterly trivial port to Darwin + XonX) we'll never see more than token penetration of the university campus market. It's a shame, too. OS X is the best research computing environment I know of except for those 4 big reasons to stay away.

  1. SteveBoker

    Fresh-Faced Recruit

    Joined: May 2001

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    10/31, 09:13pm | report spam | Reply |

    SAS support would be a bi

    I'm a professor at Notre Dame. I teach statistics. I use OS X (and before that NeXT) on a daily basis to get my work done.

    Yeah, I too know SAS. SAS is a dinosaur from the 1960's for goodness sake. I hate it and don't use it any more than absolutely necessary. On the other hand, I'm teaching it in my Multivariate Statistics course this week because in order to get a job, students _must_ know how to use it. SAS is one of the 4 absolutely positively necessary applications for university research and teaching use. The lack of support from SAS, SPSS, Matlab and Gauss contribute more to the lack of sales of Macs in universities than any other cause. I'd include Splus too, but now there is a nice open source alternative called R that runs on OS X. I know that other alternatives exist to get your work done, but we professors have to prepare the students for the current work environment. Sure I hate SAS and I don't use it in my own research, but if I didn't teach it my students would be less employable. Sad fact of life.

    Believe me, if university IT people could consolidate their Suns and Windows boxes into one architecture, they'd go for it. But without the "big 4" of research, they just can't do it. They're responsible to the tuition paying students just like we professors are. All the "big 4" packages run both on Windows and Solaris. Because they don't run on Macs, Macs are considered to be "toys". I know it's unfair, awful, illogical, etc. But it doesn't matter how much you howl, this is a force of nature like the moon and the tides. Until Apple wakes up and induces these four developers to port to OS X (which would in each case be an utterly trivial port to Darwin + XonX) we'll never see more than token penetration of the university campus market. It's a shame, too. OS X is the best research computing environment I know of except for those 4 big reasons to stay away.

  1. michaelgemar

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    10/31, 11:22pm | report spam | Reply | delete

    SPSS is here

    The lack of support from SAS, SPSS, Matlab and Gauss contribute more to the lack of sales of Macs in universities than any other cause

    While the other three are indeed missing from the Mac, SPSS 10.0 for Mac is already here. It currently only runs under 9.1 (not Classic), but is being ported to OS X. (Indeed, SPSS made a big deal out of their "10 on X" promise a few months ago.)

    And I imagine that if OS X proves itself in other domains, software companies with UNIX versions will eventually be convinced to port to OS X.

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