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MacKichan Software, maker of Scientific Word, has gone out of business

mackichan.com

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Re: MacKichan Software, maker of Scientific Word, has gone out of business

#61

Post by GiovanniP »

quietbritishjim wrote: post #34
GiovanniP wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> does pretty poorly at importing LaTeX As far as I know, an importer that interprets arbitrary LaTeX cannot exist (i.e. you have to run LaTeX on the file) because the grammar of LaTeX documents is Turing-complete. There is a StackExchange Q&A where this is explained, but I do not understand the arguments ;-)

That makes sense. Also (and I realise this is a bit less deep than undecidable grammar) I've certainly seen LaTeX documents with so many random macros that I don't recognise the content of it at all! I'm sure we've all come across those. I can understand why a program wouldn't stand much of a chance. Personally I never really needed LaTeX import so I don't really see it as a problem, but I know it matters to some peo…

On the "import from LaTeX" Joris van der Hoeven advanced the argument that the impossibility of writing a general import file from LaTeX allows LaTeX to maintain its status as the main document preparation system for scientific articles. In fact, if you could import arbitrary LaTeX, an user of a different system could collaborate with LaTeX users (probably a form of "conservative conversion" would be necessary for back and forth translation between document formats).

Re: MacKichan Software, maker of Scientific Word, has gone out of business

#62

Post by jaclaz »

lowercased wrote: post #21
scrdhrt wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My father (67, retired) has a couple of friends his age with long time, small businesses in the IT industry. One has been making some sort of map software for a very small niche in the marine industry, another has been making software for bee keepers or something similar. A third in image scanning software. They have been doing well since the late 80s, and still could be. They chose to go out of business and enjoy re…

> I suspect that, although there is a market for the products, noone is interested in taking on the software they worked on. It may be extremely difficult to do that, for at least a few reasons. In some cases, the tech is going to be very niche/old, and it will be difficult for people to get up to speed on it. The business is likely built on a lot of personal contacts, and not all will want to switch to some 'newcome…

Well, if I may, there is something that doesn't sound (to me) "rational".

I have seen quite a few of these cases where a larger company buys the old one (essentially to get a list of their current customers) and then terminates the product replacing it with some crappy new stuff that usually completely fails to work, but in this case the soon-to-retire programmer at least gets some (little) money (and knowledge is lost forever).

But if the one man company is going to shut down because the programmer is going to retire, the acquisition cost for a young, willing programmer is 0.

This hypothetical young programmer could - I believe - invest some time to understand not so much the actual codebase, but rather the workflow of the program and re-write it along that same workflow in a new language/platform/whatever.

I am pretty sure that those niche users would be ready to pay a fair amount of money to have something modern/updated that actually works and works like the old one.

What I have seen often is that the new program, for no real reason, has been written by someone that most probably is much more brilliant at programming but that knows nothing about how the program is actually used, has no idea about how to deal with some "edge" cases (that already surely happened in the tens of years of life of the old software), etc., in some ways it is like all the experience accumulated over the years is suddenly lost and the new program repeats the same (or worse) mistakes/issues that already happened (and that were already solved).

Maybe the problem is that there is not an easy way to tell to the world "I am going to retire, any taker?"

Re: MacKichan Software, maker of Scientific Word, has gone out of business

#63

Post by pvaldes »

amichail wrote: post #39
pvaldes wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a terrific tool, and people is trying hard to avoid using it? I can't see any advantage in not using TeX/LaTex versus using it.

The editing experience is horrendous compared to TeXmacs.

But the powerhorse difference, oh. It plays in a really different league.

I enjoy emacs a lot also, so is a two lose moves in one step

Re: MacKichan Software, maker of Scientific Word, has gone out of business

#64

Post by joshuaissac »

deregulateMed wrote: post #22
tibbetts wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One person businesses often require a unique collection of skills to operate and don’t make enough money to hire a team of professional operators. This is also true of traditional small businesses like restaurants and car mechanics. The phenomenon is discussed extensively in the “E-myth” series of books. The TLDR is if you ever want to get someone else to run your business, you have to be careful to systematize and d…

I relate to this. 1 person company means getting the job done. As soon as you have 2 people you really need 3. One to do the labor, the other to schedule and bill(receptionist). If it's a physical company you need more space. Some software charges by person too. If something gets cancelled, the 1 person company takes a few hours off. Your 3 person company still needs to get their weekly paychecks. Whenever I hear cal…

There are companies that provide receptionists as a service.

Re: MacKichan Software, maker of Scientific Word, has gone out of business

#65

Post by spoonjim »

DannyBee wrote: post #52
ThinkBeat wrote: post #43

I am so sorry to hear that. I wish that when companies such as this do go out of business that they should transition the licensing model to perpetual. It is gracious to keep running the licesnse server ut once it ends that is it. If the company is not going to lose any money because of it, which they will not since they are out fo the busness entirely, let the users have a chance to keep using it. (without support,…

One issue you hit, and it sounds like they may be hitting here, is the need to pay yearly royalties or other yearly licensing fees for some of the components in their software. The company that they are paying fees to is unlikely to give them a a pass. In these cases, which are not uncommon, there is not a lot they can do. (Lots of companies have a mix of perpetual and non-perpetual users and pay royalties on the yea…

Exactly... and software today, more than ever, is built upon products from a gazillion different vendors.

Re: MacKichan Software, maker of Scientific Word, has gone out of business

#66

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

musingsole wrote: post #57
iamgopal wrote: post #24

Yes but was it able to share selfie and video ?

More importantly, was it collecting usage information and dumping it onto data markets?

America: "Ethics is for chumps who want to finish last"

Re: MacKichan Software, maker of Scientific Word, has gone out of business

#67

Post by GiovanniP »

syntaxfree wrote: post #53
pjmlp wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that Word does LaTeX math, why would that be?

The math equations made by Word have a distinctive appearance. Partly because they’re objectively worse in some (a few) aspects, partly because people associate them with Word, the result feels amateurish. This isn’t purely an intrinsic technical quality of Word, it’s just how the cookie crumbles.

> The math equations made by Word have a distinctive appearance.

Try and use the GUST fonts (http://www.gust.org.pl/projects/e-foundry), Microsoft Word equations will look then excellently made. The last time I used the GUST fonts, by the way, I was able to export Word documents to pdf only be printing, as using the pdf converter some glyphs would "lose pieces"; and exporting via printing I would lose the clickable links. But I did not try with the Word plugin for the latest versions of Acrobat.

Re: MacKichan Software, maker of Scientific Word, has gone out of business

#68

Post by spoonjim »

jaclaz wrote: post #62
lowercased wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I suspect that, although there is a market for the products, noone is interested in taking on the software they worked on. It may be extremely difficult to do that, for at least a few reasons. In some cases, the tech is going to be very niche/old, and it will be difficult for people to get up to speed on it. The business is likely built on a lot of personal contacts, and not all will want to switch to some 'newcome…

Well, if I may, there is something that doesn't sound (to me) "rational". I have seen quite a few of these cases where a larger company buys the old one (essentially to get a list of their current customers) and then terminates the product replacing it with some crappy new stuff that usually completely fails to work, but in this case the soon-to-retire programmer at least gets some (little) money (and knowledge is lo…

Yes, that young, entrepreneurial programmer can be found, but won’t have the domain knowledge. Look at the examples above. You can’t sell Marine mapping software without knowing something about marine navigation. You can’t sell beekeeping software without understanding beekeeping. Plus you need the general business operation skills. Finding a programmer who knows beekeeping and wants to take on a low growth business is not as easy as finding a programmer on Upwork.

Re: MacKichan Software, maker of Scientific Word, has gone out of business

#69

Post by GiovanniP »

syntaxfree wrote: post #50
quietbritishjim wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a pity it's called "TeXmacs" when, as you say, it really has no connection to TeX (except the ability to typeset mathematics). Another alternative is LyX, which actually does use LaTeX. Even that is not really a "LaTeX editor" though: it produces/exports excellent LaTeX, and uses that for typesetting, but does pretty poorly at importing LaTeX (as the developers freely admit). Depending on your situation that may…

Re: lyx as a hard to get into GUI. Overleaf has decent tab completion and dozens of templates, as well as limited support for markdown. Let tabnine and copilot get to LaTeX; I think we’ll find the discoverability of “text language on Adderall” outguns GUIs.

My main "for" point towards GUIs is that one is able to read back easily what one wrote. On the other hand, to read comfortably a LaTeX equation I have to compile it; then for editing I have to move my attention back and forth from the compiled document to the source. (corrected a mistype)

Re: MacKichan Software, maker of Scientific Word, has gone out of business

#70

Post by Breza »

quietbritishjim wrote: post #27
amichail wrote: post #3

Will everyone switch to TeXmacs, which is truly WYSIWYG and does not use TeX/LaTeX? See: https://www.texmacs.org/tmweb/home/videos.en.html

It's a pity it's called "TeXmacs" when, as you say, it really has no connection to TeX (except the ability to typeset mathematics). Another alternative is LyX, which actually does use LaTeX. Even that is not really a "LaTeX editor" though: it produces/exports excellent LaTeX, and uses that for typesetting, but does pretty poorly at importing LaTeX (as the developers freely admit). Depending on your situation that may…

LyX is a truly underrated piece of software. It was my entry point into LaTeX.
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