Mathcad Prime 3.1, 4 and 5 Lack of features

[MarkBuckton]

‌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"

[RobSeager]

Mark,

I am with you about MatLAB.  It seems to be a retrograde step, particularly for passing maths on as it is not easy to read.  I have been told that they are releasing a graphical interface.  At least maths would then look like maths!  For teaching and communicating ideas that is highly important.  I am with everybody else, despairing at the incredible arrogance of PTC.

[RickMason]

Thanks Mark.  It seems that there is just no alternative solution for the features of Mathcad that I both need and like.  Once again, I have just the paid the yearly v15 extortion fee.  I at least need for it to continue to work properly since they continue to break as many features as they fix in each release in order to keep us all mainlining. But I feel the need to continue to be very clear that I am not a happy camper.  Shoot me, I'm insane.

[ebrady]

[ebrady]

The Posted image is a comparison of MathCAD 15 and Prime 3.1 Simplifying the same expression. The low  quality of the graphics is a function of the forum.

Look at how unreadable Prime 3.1 becomes with long results and how incapable the Prime 3.1 simplification-engine is compared to the MathCAD 15 simplification-engine.

[RichardJ]

They use the exact same symbolic engine, so something else is different. Please post the two worksheets.

[mfrench]

I suspect that much the dissatisfaction with Prime 3.1 stems from bad formatting as much as from problems with actual mathematical capability.  I know my biggest gripes are with trying to format for printing.  The plotting is still pretty rough and the solve blocks take way too much space.

[ebrady]

You are correct. The MathCAD 15 matrix norm was generated manually by me and I did not take the absolute value inside the squared components of the magnitude functions. The Prime 3.1 version was auto-generated and Prime 3.1 took the absolute value of the components prior to squaring them. The two functions were from the same source and I assumed they were the same and probably subconsciously ignored the absolutes inside squares because |x|^2 usually equals (x)^2 unless you expect a complex value of x. I understand that the symbolic processor may think differently. Having had other issues with prime, I was too quick to give up; I should have looked closer. I stand corrected.