Mathcad dreams

[ValeryOchkov]

Each of us loves to dream. A person dreams that he has become the richest person on earth and can afford this or that. Another dreams that he would become the president of the United States or Russia and would do this or that.
My dreams are more modest.
My dream is that PTC will finally be smart enough to make Mathcad a free program. Not only Express. but full version of Mathcad 15 and Prime. At the same time, I am confident that PTC's earnings will grow at the same time. Why? Explainer!
Those using Matcad for STEM education will get to know Creo, etc., and then move on to this project. The bottom line! By making Matcad free, PTC will generate more revenue.

[StuartBruff]

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@ValeryOchkov wrote:

Each of us loves to dream. One dreams that he has become the richest man on earth and can afford this or that. Another dreams that he became the president of the United States or Russia and would do this or that.
My dreams are more modest.
I dream that PTC will finally be smart enough to make Mathcad a free program. Not only Express. but the full version Mathcad 15 and Prime. At the same time, I am confident that PTC revenues will grow at the same time. Why? Explaining!
Those who use Matcad for educational purposes on the STEM technology will get acquainted with Creo etc and then will move on to this project. Total! By making Matcad free, the PTS firm will receive more income.

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I'm not so sure, Valery.   

Perhaps the marketing guys could (although I'm guessing not, for commercial reasons) tell us how much impact Mathcad Express had on uptake of Mathcad Prime, and how much Prime leads on to other PTC products?  Mathcad Prime is, AFAIA, sold at a reasonable price to students: https://www.mathcad.uk/product/ptc-mathcad-student-licence-subscription/

I'm not even sure how much overlap there is between the (potential) Mathcad user base and Creo.  Apart from Excel, the main external software that I (and others in my working environments) interacted with were Matlab and Simulink.  The latter two required M11..15 Components as the interface, which isn't possible in Prime.  I also used Axum for its enhanced plotting capability and Smartsketch(?) for a while. 

At the moment I usually play around with algorithms and microcontrollers, and I'm starting to look at some AI. Perhaps my biggest problem with Mathcad at the moment isn't directly to do with the product - I'm constantly losing track of where I've defined (and refined) useful functions.  It would be nice to have some sort of configuration control software that managed this kind of thing and had a Windows Explorer interface to make it easy to use.  I'm guessing that some of PTC's more useful looking products (Thingworx, Windchill) are going to be overkill for my needs.  I'll probably also need to sit down with a very stiff whisky and an oxygen supply before even thinking about looking at their prices.

I think a more realistic approach would be to make Mathcad Prime cost-competitive with its main maths application rivals.  As I've mentioned before, much though I like Mathcad, its current capability and text processing shortcomings, plus its current annual subscription price, do not make it an attractive option financially ... I would have to consume много пива и очень много водки before my beer goggles (пивные очки?) even glanced in its direction!  

Oh, keeping on topic, my dream would be to remain within the Mathcad IDE for everything I needed to do, from initial whiteboard/beermat ideas through to publication standard ... and without resorting to robbing a few banks, or stealing Bill Gates' loose change, to pay for it!

Stuart

[DJNewman]

Mathcad marketing guy here. Mathcad Express is critically important for Mathcad Prime adoption. Both the 30-day free trial and the free-for-life-reduced-functionality part. Biggest marketing tool we have, since it's turned our whole business model into freemium. And in 2022, we're going to work harder for the Express to Prime uptake. (Mathcad Express Prime 8, notably.)

With regards to Mathcad purchases leading to Creo purchases, and this is why the "Mathcad Dream" won't be profitable for PTC, as our general manager Brian Thompson said in a recent interview, ~75% or so of Mathcad customers don't have any other PTC products. And that's probably not because they don't like Creo or anything (Creo is great and everyone knows it!), but most Mathcad customers are not mechanical engineers, so they have little use for a 3D CAD platform. So it's relatively easy to sell Mathcad to Creo customers, and last year we added Mathcad to Creo Design Advanced and Creo Design Advanced Plus, so now it's included in four  of the five Creo Design packages. But it's harder to sell Creo to Mathcad customers.

Mathcad is already quite affordable for students and universities, but the "give away free products for STEM education" strategy is what another PTC product, Onshape, is trying right now. PTC Education is very proud of that. We'll see what "very cheap" versus "free" does for paid product adoption in some years from now.

[StuartBruff]

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@DJNewman wrote:

Mathcad marketing guy here. Mathcad Express is critically important for Mathcad Prime adoption. Both the 30-day free trial and the free-for-life-reduced-functionality part. Biggest marketing tool we have, since it's turned our whole business model into freemium. And in 2022, we're going to work harder for the Express to Prime uptake. (Mathcad Express Prime 8, notably.)

With regards to Mathcad purchases leading to Creo purchases, and this is why the "Mathcad Dream" won't be profitable for PTC, as our general manager Brian Thompson said in a recent interview, ~75% or so of Mathcad customers don't have any other PTC products. And that's probably not because they don't like Creo or anything (Creo is great and everyone knows it!), but most Mathcad customers are not mechanical engineers, so they have little use for a 3D CAD platform. So it's relatively easy to sell Mathcad to Creo customers, and last year we added Mathcad to Creo Design Advanced and Creo Design Advanced Plus, so now it's included in four  of the five Creo Design packages. But it's harder to sell Creo to Mathcad customers.

Mathcad is already quite affordable for students and universities, but the "give away free products for STEM education" strategy is what another PTC product, Onshape, is trying right now. PTC Education is very proud of that. We'll see what "very cheap" versus "free" does for paid product adoption in some years from now.

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Thanks for that insight, Dave.  Very interesting, particularly the implications for a long-term strategy.

By "Onshape" do you mean this: https://www.onshape.com/en/

Cheers,

Stuart

[DJNewman]

Yup!

PTC bought out Onshape for a large amount of money a couple of years ago.

[ValeryOchkov]

Hi marketing guy!

Currently, many high schools and universities are switching to STEM education technology. They are faced with the choice of which math package to choose for this. Many, for obvious reasons, choose free packages, which should be on the computers of schools and universities and on the computers of pupils and students at home (Covid-19 !!!). STEM education is primarily mathematical programs, not CAD. CAD will be needed later, when the object is modeled.
I am sure that Prime is the best package for STEM. But in the Express version, you drowned out a lot of what is needed for schoolchildren and students, and left open what is not needed at all. I can help you to point what tools are need an which not need!
See 2⁵ Problems for STEM Education - 1st Edition - Valery Ochkov - Rout (routledge.com)

[ValeryOchkov]

One good idea for marketing, for compromise. A good marketing is a good compromise!

I have free Express but need the Find or Odesolve function. And no more.

I pay 20 $ for example and get it!

But the big problem is that many budgetary organizations - schools and universities have painful problems with the organization of purchases and this almost does not depend on the price of the product. The organization must somehow prove that it is the best product or organize a tender - who will offer the best price. Huge bureaucracy!

Yes, a schoolchild or student can buy a program for their own money. But in the context of a pandemic (and its end is not in sight), the universities themselves must purchase programs for home computers of students and schoolchildren! And then problems arise!

[StuartBruff]

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@ValeryOchkov wrote:

One good idea for marketing, for compromise. A good marketing is a good compromise!

I have free Express but need the Find or Odesolve function. And no more.

I pay 20 $ for example and get it!

This we can agree on (in principle).  I think I've suggested something similar ... 

https://community.ptc.com/t5/PTC-Mathcad/Bug-in-Symbolic-Solver/m-p/761352/highlight/true#M198647

(gosh, that was hard to find)

Talking of "play", it would be interesting if PTC followed the pricing strategy of some games.   You can play the basic maths game for free but pay for extra "skills", such as programming or symbolics.  I quite like the MATLAB purchase model: pay £75 for the core MATLAB and the (around) £25 for additional toolboxes. Hmm,  maybe a Mathcad model of paying to upgrade Express to an expandable version, throwing in a few basic, omitted functions (such as Re, Im, and mean), and then adding "skills".  As long it was price competitive, though.

I prefer your price!  😀

Stuart

[DJNewman]

Understood! PTC has a few sellers, as well as partners, who have a lot of experience and knowledge about what it takes to sell to universities. Their business model is a bit separate from non-education Mathcad. I admit I don't know as much about that process as I do the selling to companies/individuals part.

As for the "what if we sold additional Mathcad functionality for additional money on top of Express?" part, that's definitely something that's been talked about for Mathcad even before I came to PTC. We have direct inspiration on how to do that; Creo does it with extensions. I can't really speak freely to the particulars on our discussions about it though. My apologies!

[ValeryOchkov]

A rather dubious marketing ploy is that I cannot open a document created in Prime N+1 in Prime N. Who calculated what this move brought more - income or loss?

[StuartBruff]

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@ValeryOchkov wrote:

A rather dubious marketing ploy is that I cannot open a document created in Prime N+1 in Prime N. Who calculated what this move brought more - income or loss?

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I suspect that decision might have been influenced by the tendency of many people to stick with Mathcad 2000BC for as long as possible before upgrading.  I certainly came across that attitude.  "By the heck, lad, if drawing on cave wall were good enough for me then, it's good enough for me now.  You and your fancy paper and brushes and colours.".  Other reasons, such as cost and training are available (I plead guilty as charged with respect to cost). 

Surprisingly, for professions that rely upon innovation, people often need motivating to move out of their comfort zone and try something new, even if it would be beneficial.

Stuart

[DJNewman]

I wouldn't consider it dubious. Forward compatibility is very rare in this industry. It's very expensive to do that in terms of R&D cost, which I'm sure we (and customers, based on our backlog of customer-asked requests) would rather use for other things.

Meanwhile, PTC as a whole supports extensive backward compatibility. (There are some exceptions like Mathcad 15 files in Mathcad Prime, but that's a whole different product family.)

My impression in briefly researching this is that vendors support backwards compatibility, no compatibility, or they're Software-as-a-Service and no one faces this issue because everything is always on the latest version anyway. If you can find case studies of forward-compatible software and the benefits those vendors see in doing that, let me know. (It won't change PTC's policy, but it'd make for an interesting discussion?)

[LucMeekes]

Indeed, there are very few software packages that will read the output generated by subsequent (newer) versions, unless the output is a very common format (e.g. ASCII text, CSV,  RTF, DBF). The 'richer' the output format, the less likely (old) versions of the software will be able to read the output of newer versions. There's one exponent example:

Microsoft Office 2003 (Word, for one) was provided with a downloadable extension to allow its applications to work with Office 2007 and later documents...

And MsWord 2007 has no problem reading documents created by any of the versions 2010, 2013, 2016 or 2019. I think the same is true for other Office applications: Excel, PowerPoint and Access.

There are many software packages, apart from MsOffice, that allow to save content for predecessor versions of the software, or for other software applications.

I think that the benefits seen by Microsoft in doing the above are clear. They apparently count on having a(n extremely) large installed and used base of their application software. I can only guess that PTC intends to be a small company and sell little of their software....

Luc

[Werner_E]

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@LucMeekes wrote:

I can only guess that PTC intends to be a small company and sell little of their software....

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In mathematics its well know, that the greedy algorithm may look like a simple and obvious solution to deal with some optimization problems, but most of time its by far not the most efficient. Maybe PTC is simply lacking that math knowledge 😉

[StuartBruff]

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@DJNewman wrote:

I wouldn't consider it dubious. Forward compatibility is very rare in this industry. It's very expensive to do that in terms of R&D cost, which I'm sure we (and customers, based on our backlog of customer-asked requests) would rather use for other things.

Meanwhile, PTC as a whole supports extensive backward compatibility. (There are some exceptions like Mathcad 15 files in Mathcad Prime, but that's a whole different product family.)

My impression in briefly researching this is that vendors support backwards compatibility, no compatibility, or they're Software-as-a-Service and no one faces this issue because everything is always on the latest version anyway. If you can find case studies of forward-compatible software and the benefits those vendors see in doing that, let me know. (It won't change PTC's policy, but it'd make for an interesting discussion?)

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I suspect such complaints are about backward file compatibility rather than backwards functional compatibility.

Perhaps the underlying question is "What is the overriding functional reason for changing a file format such that a Mathcad M/P X worksheet should be unreadable in Mathcad M/P X-1?"  ... particularly if M/P X-1 can run the (transcribed) expressions just fine.

Stuart

[DJNewman]

Ah, well, I don't have the real answer to that. (A technical person at PTC might.) But I can offer unenlightened speculation!

Maybe it's technologically difficult (or R&D resource-intensive) to figure out if MP X-1 can run everything from the MP X worksheet fine, and they don't want to assume that's the case because that kind of broken experience would be undesirable. What would happen if Mathcad Prime 6 were to encounter a combo box first introduced in Mathcad Prime 7?

Maybe it'd require pushing an update to MP X-1 and they don't want to sink R&D resources to make a Mathcad Prime 6.1 because you can just upgrade to MP X (7 in this case) at no additional cost anyway, as long as you're paying your subscription. (Or your maintenance support if you have a perpetual licence.)

[StuartBruff]

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@DJNewman wrote:

Ah, well, I don't have the real answer to that. (A technical person at PTC might.) But I can offer unenlightened speculation!

Maybe it's technologically difficult (or R&D resource-intensive) to figure out if MP X-1 can run everything from the MP X worksheet fine, and they don't want to assume that's the case because that kind of broken experience would be undesirable. What would happen if Mathcad Prime 6 were to encounter a combo box first introduced in Mathcad Prime 7?

Maybe it'd require pushing an update to MP X-1 and they don't want to sink R&D resources to make a Mathcad Prime 6.1 because you can just upgrade to MP X (7 in this case) at no additional cost anyway, as long as you're paying your subscription. (Or your maintenance support if you have a perpetual licence.)

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That is a good point.  However, there are relatively straightforward ways around that problem (for X+1 onwards, anyway); for example, tagging each new/modified feature element with the version number and importing the element as a collapsible text region/component, annotated with a picture of a dragon saying "Here be new features" 🐉.  ... Err, sorry, ☹️.  I may be getting a little carried away here - it's been one of those days. 

A more general solution, and I suspect one favoured by many, is "Save As X-n".

Stuart

Still, if there is any way that a dragon could be squeezed in there somewhere ...

[LucMeekes]

I think your argument won't do. No user of Prime would expect that Prime 1 runs 'everything' that Prime 7 supports. And no user would expect a Prime 6.1 version to support Prime 7 features. But there are lot of Prime 7 sheets that do not use any of the new functional features and could be perfectly read and fully supported by previous versions. There are two obvious options to go:

1.

Have Prime X-n (n>0) read Prime X files, but signal a warning when it encounters one or more constructs it wasn't prepared to handle. In case of Prime 6 encountering a combo-box: "Found some items in the file that are only supported in newer versions." (It might even flag their positions, much like the converter from Mathcad 15-and-before does when it encounters one of the many features that Prime still does not support.)

Note that the Combo-box is a functional feature that cannot be simply replaced, so it would result in a non-functional region. But there are many properties introduced between Prime 1 and Prime 7 that can be simply left out without functional consequences.

2.

Have Prime X allow to save to Prime X-n (n>0) sheet files, but put out a warning that certain regions may not be supported in the predecessor versions.

A third option could be to do like Microsoft did for Office 2003 and before, to support reading documents created by newer versions, but I don't propose to go that road.

Success!
Luc

[StuartBruff]

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@LucMeekes wrote:

I think your argument won't do. No user of Prime would expect that Prime 1 runs 'everything' that Prime 7 supports. And no user would expect a Prime 6.1 version to support Prime 7 features. But there are lot of Prime 7 sheets that do not use any of the new functional features and could be perfectly read and fully supported by previous versions. There are two obvious options to go:

1.

Have Prime X-n (n>0) read Prime X files, but signal a warning when it encounters one or more constructs it wasn't prepared to handle. In case of Prime 6 encountering a combo-box: "Found some items in the file that are only supported in newer versions." (It might even flag their positions, much like the converter from Mathcad 15-and-before does when it encounters one of the many features that Prime still does not support.)

Note that the Combo-box is a functional feature that cannot be simply replaced, so it would result in a non-functional region. But there are many properties introduced between Prime 1 and Prime 7 that can be simply left out without functional consequences.

c

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Probably Prime X-n (0<n<X), as (IMO) it's unlikely that PTC would introduce retrospective read patches for Prime X-n (n≥X ∈ ℕ).  In which case, the Combobox shouldn't be an issue, unless it gets modified/replaced in Prime X+k (k>0).  See your point 3, also.

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2.

Have Prime X allow to save to Prime X-n (n>0) sheet files, but put out a warning that certain regions may not be supported in the predecessor versions.

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And install Prime Express X to see what the saved Prime X worksheet looks like.

Stuart

(I still think there should be a dragon 👿. Perhaps animated on mouseOver? ... 🤔)

[ValeryOchkov]

One idea for Mathcad marketing - one Mathcad gift

Mathcad-clock - PTC Community

[StuartBruff]

Из праздного любопытства, Валерий, зачем ты сменил язык с английского на русский?

Stuart

[ValeryOchkov]

It was done automatically without me. 

[StuartBruff]

Хорошо.