Re:Well, if they ever become competitive to Matlab (Score 5, Interesting)

I bought a license for Matlab for my old PowerPC-based PowerBook about a year ago, and was initially quite pleased with Mathworks- the times I had to call them for support, they were helpful and responsive. All that changed when I switched to an Intel-based Mac a month or so ago. While moving all of my software over to my new laptop, I observed that most software companies used one of two possible approaches to the software redistribution problem:

1. Release an Intel-compatible binary of their product, and make it available to current license-holders free of charge; or
2. Take advantage of the opportunity to do a new major-version revision of their product, which license-holders would have to pay to upgrade to.

Each of these, to me, seem like reasonable solutions— if it's a major-version update, I'd have to pay for it anyway... and if it's just a recompiled version of the product I already have, it should be free to current users. It turns out, however, that there was a third possibility, which is what Mathworks chose:

3. Release a new minor-version Universal Binary update, and then make all current customers buy a new full-price license in order to get it.

So, in order to run Matlab on an Intel-based Mac, current PowerPC license holders have to re-purchase their expensive software from scratch. No upgrade path, no nothing— just a nice, loud, "screw you" from Mathworks to their users. And it's not like we could just use our PowerPC verisons under Rosetta- there was a workaround, but it involved disabling all of the graphing/visualization features. Basically, it was a "pay for a full new license or don't use Matlab on your new computer" kind of thing.

I dunno, maybe it's not that big of a deal, but it still felt pretty crappy. From a customer service standpoint, it wasn't exactly a master-stroke- it wouldn't have really cost them anything just to let current license-holders have an Intel-compatible copy of the software they'd already paid for...