Wolfram Research had their Wolfram Technology Conference 2006. I expected that they would introduce Mathematica 6 at the conference, but apparently they didn't. I say apparently, because the entire conference caused not a ripple on the Internet.
Why? It seems they made all the participants sign blanket Nondisclosure agreements (NDA's), saying they couldn't talk about anything at the conference. The only mention I can find about the conference is one blog post from a guy complaining about the NDA.
From the titles of sessions, they were talking about Mathematica 6. I'm a customer who uses Mathematica. I want to know what happened! This seems a completely silly way to do things. Wolfram must be incredibly out of touch to actively squelch all mention of the conference and products. Wouldn't want any buzz or excitement about our products. That could be dangerous.
WTF!
Actually I've found this blog while searching for some news about Mathematica 6.
There isn't much in the conference proceedings:
http://library.wolfram.com/infocenter/search/?search_results=1;pages_count=20;search_item_type=21;search_field_1=conference;search_string_1=2006%20Wolfram%20Technology%20Conference
I like Mathematica very much, but absolutely hate Wolfram's attitude. Locking out the public can only hurt the company, so I don't understand why. They make you pay for every little thing that should be included with the main product: RealTime3D is almost unusable, but you have to pay to get Dynamic Visualizer; you have to pay to get access to the Mathematica Journal; there's only one good Mma newsgroup, but it is moderated (of course, this is sometimes a good thing, but I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out that an inquiry about Mma 6 doesn't even get through their censorship).
I was tempted to switch to some other maths system solely for these reasons, but (in my opinion) unfortunately there still isn't any other product---open or commercial---that's as good as Mathematica.
Posted by: Stranger | October 19, 2006 at 05:12 PM
I was there and I took pictures. Want to see them?
http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=WTC2006&w=73431501%40N00
Posted by: Kathryn Cramer | November 10, 2006 at 10:42 AM
It is not necessarily the case that guarding proprietary secrets by NDA's is ultimately harmful to marketing the product. Why should they give too much advance notice to their competitors, after all?
Posted by: Murray Eisenberg | February 24, 2007 at 11:53 AM