Interesting how even the word 'acquires' is different with IBM. SPSS is in analytics software, but its a 41 year-old company.

Its unlikely its founders 'planned' their exit strategy when they started. I also don't think I will see Google or even Microsoft 'acquire' a 20+ year old company, let alone a 40+ year old one.

Isn't SPSS the very first independently sold commercial software package?

IBM, please fix their software, it crashes all the time, the new versions of SPSS are slow, the charts are ugly as hell and the file formats are not open.

It would be the best thing in the world if they could open source it, but I'm not holding my breath. I guess I could learn R, but old habits die hard...

You're putting a lot of faith into IBM as far as user experience goes. You, my friend, have apparently never used Lotus Notes.

Indeed, this was my response when I heard the news:

"SPSS should find a comfortable place in IBM's portfolio of impossible-to-use products"

My only exposure to IBM products were their Thinkpads and the various open source they contributed to.

I heard about Lotus Notes, they say it's the hell-spawn of a whore and a prostitute.

Internally we prefer to refer to it as "Bloatus Goats" :)

Or ClearCase.

Interesting. I always thought IBM would invest more into the R project which would seem more synergistic with their Linux strategy.

Their "Linux strategy" is to sell hardware and consulting. In fact at IBM that is just called "strategy".

IBM rarely has one unified strategy. Hardware, software and services all battle for things to achieve their goals.

Maybe IBM will fix the ridiculous licensing situation with SPSS... Ehh this is IBM I'm sure they'll make it worse

I reversed engineered their data files back in grad school while studying statistics. They were coded in base-three. I never figured out why.

found via @monkchips on twitter