Mathcad Prime 3.1, 4 and 5 Lack of features

Just everything Mark said. Yeah. I've tried nearly every release of Prime, for about 30 minutes, and then back to 15.

I've led product development, including SW, decades. There are only two reasons PTC is where they are today with regards to Mathcad:

1. Total incompetence, which I doubt (no one could be this bad!)

2. Top down management decision on where to put resources. We are all paying our maintenance fees, so the cash flow is there. No real competition - so ....

In terms of competition - I'm doing more an more with Matlab. But I greatly prefer the Mathcad symbolic interface. As a technical manager and not an individual contributor, my need to perform analysis or simulation are infrequent (but not nonexistent), and the Mathcad interface is much easier to pick back up w/o having to remember a lot of special syntax and such.

What we need is some true competition in this space - things would change if that were to happen. Matchad would pony up or die. But for now they are just doing the "chaching!" while keeping the hook baited with promises.

Jim

Hi Mark,

Like you, I've wondered what PTC thinks they are doing with Mathcad. I've read many of the posts on this forum and have talked to a few folks from PTC. My opinion is:

• PTC has a vision for Mathcad that doesn't square with what much of their user community wants. They are going that direction whether this community likes it or not.
• If they cared what we wanted, they would have acted by now. We can complain if it makes us feel better, but it won't matter.
• They know they don't have any real competition. There are lots of good number crunching programs, but the user interfaces are usually deal breakers. Among users like us, they have a monopoly and they are acting like it.
• The fact that we are still here on this forum and complaining means we haven't dumped Mathcad and PTC knows this. When we all bail in favor of Maple, Mathematica or whatever and their sales tank, then they will care. For now, my guess is that their Mathcad revenue is still OK.
• Quit thinking Prime is going to be as good as M15 any time soon. It's not and PTC isn't going to change that. When they have real competition, then they will start fixing Prime, but not before.

I hope this isn't too cynical. My guess is that PTC thinks they can make money from Prime as they envision it. I think they figure they will lose some customers who prefer M15, but that will be an acceptable loss. They are just making a business decision. It's not personal.

We just have to face it. MathCAD Prime is not fit for purpose. Support for v15 is minimal and, like a lot of other people, I cannot see any justification for trying to migrate to Prime. I don't want a Microsoft Word Look alike that does some basic mathematics. All the new interface is just aimed at management to the detriment of people wanting to do real maths.

I don't want to have to add titles etc. to graphs by adding text boxes. This is so retrograde.

A conversation with a support engineer in Europe was revealing. He expressed surprise that I was still using v15 with Win 7 as it "didn't work that well with it". That was the gist of his comment.

I need to plan an exit route

I have been a MathCAD user since Mathsoft-MathCAD 3.0.
The frst thing I did after successfully installing newly purchased MathCAD 15 M030 and Prime 3.0 was to
symbolically evaluate a large equation that I had trouble processing in MathCAD 14.
Prime 3.0 failed to process the equation and MathCAD 15 successfully processed the equation.

I can now add to this that, Prime 3.1 failed to process the equation.

When the world was more capitalist, we had inspired-innovators with reputations instead of credentials; the result was exceptionalism.

As the world became more socialist, we accumulated more entitled-experts sitting on their credentials; the result was mediocracy.

When the entitlement of credentials becomes more important than the reputation of exceptionalism, mediocracy results.