Can someone at PTC explain to us why Mathsoft that had a revenue of only $20 million was able to deliver a Mathcad product that is superior in just about everway to Mathcad Prime 3.1? If you recall, before PTC purchased Mathsoft for $62 million (yes they got a bargain) we had a Mathcad version with scriptable objects, Mathcad web server, flexible plotting with grid lines and dual y, legends and so on, the choice of solvers in the solve blocks, a faster interface, less ugly solve blocks, and the ability to save in a MS Word format. Probably the only thing missing was the units in solve blocks and auto numbering of equations as is done in Maple. Now we are told that probably not even version 5 of Mathcad will not have all these misting features That we had ten years ago. According to what I read PTC has revenues of 1.5 Billion per year. So the real question that one has to ask is how can a company 75 times the size of the original Mathsoft be so incompetent? What did happen to the original 130 Mathsoft employees? How many in the Mathcad division now? And what in the hell are they doing with their time? In my view, the only way that PTC can reinvigorate Mathsoft is to excise it from the main company i.e. make it a wholly owned subsidiary of the parent. If you recall this is what Apple did with FileMaker and that software has become better and better with each version. At present Mathcad gets more buggy with each version. Management it would seam is more interested in themselves than the product. As with many large companies middle management gets paid very well for doing almost nothing. PTC GET YOUR ACT TOGETHER or users will be leaving in droves. In what universe does someone pay many thousands of dollars in maintenance for a software product that gets worse with ever new version? I believe PTC new marketing catchphrase is
"There's a sucker born every minute"
