MS Visual-R

Microsoft has purchased Revolution (an R company). Here are some reactions:

• http://www.r-bloggers.com/microsoft-acquires-revolution-analytics-news-roundup/
• http://www.forbes.com/sites/danwoods/2015/01/27/microsofts-revolution-analytics-acquisition-is-the-wrong-way-to-embrace-r/
• http://www.forbes.com/sites/danwoods/2015/01/28/how-microsoft-could-implement-a-hybrid-embrace-of-r/
• http://blogs.wsj.com/cio/2015/01/26/microsoft-courts-data-scientists-with-revolution-analytics-buy/
• http://www.infoworld.com/article/2876535/application-development/can-microsoft-make-r-easy.html

Some thoughts:

1. MS has already R inside Azure-ML. https://studio.azureml.net/
2. I always thought of ML (Machine Learning) as a somewhat smallish but highly fashionable subset of Statistics, but now it seems ML is hyped so much to completely obscure Statistics.
3. Is ML really that big?
4. ML has little bit more of a CS and IT background (traditional statistics more of a math background with perhaps most applications in the social sciences?). May be CS/IT people are much better in their public relations. Also many companies nowadays see IT as core business, so may be there is more funding available for doing significant ML applications.
5. MS has a poor performance record wrt analytics: poor Solver Foundation was abandoned in a bad way leaving some clients hanging to dry.
6. MS already has a popular statistics package (it is called Excel). (Joking!)
7. MS is a little bit late: IBM purchased SPSS in 2009.
8. R is very successfully riding this hype cycle. Not bad for a somewhat funky and older language (rooted in S).
9. Do we get an R.NET?
10. TIBCO offers a commercial re-implementation of R.
11. ML vs Statistics: http://brenocon.com/blog/2008/12/statistics-vs-machine-learning-fight/