Stephen Wolfram Q&A

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Some collected questions and answers by Stephen Wolfram

Questions may be edited for brevity; see links for full questions.

June 1, 1996

From: Interview by Stephen Collart, Euromath Bulletin

Do you believe that any further major general-purpose symbolic computation systems could be successfully launched in the future?

You mean Mathematica competitors? It depends what you mean by “major”. If we don’t do anything really stupid, I think it’s unlikely anyone else will reach a million users in the foreseeable future. But the more successful we are, the more there’ll be people who’ll want to claim that they’re building systems that are like ours. There’s certainly nothing impossible about building something like Mathematica—after all, we’ve done it. But it’ll take a great deal of effort, and I very much doubt the marketplace would be all that interested.

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