University of Missouri graduate student Mitch Hardin recently posted a note on his blog about how after spending a lot of quality time with SPSS he switched to R, a free software environment for statistical computing and graphics that runs on a variety of platforms (Windows, MacOS, Unix).

Although R is “almost entirely command-line driven,” Mitch likes the fact that it offers more information about what is going on and there are a lot of user-defined function. Personally, I can’t imagine using a command-line to do my stats processing, but then I’m not a big one for getting things done in SPSS syntax either. I couldn’t find much evidence of people using R for marketing research, but the software is free and I can’t imagine why it wouldn’t work if you needed a powerful statistical package but didn’t want to spend a lot of money.

• Mitch Harden’s post on Somatopsychic
• R Project for Statistical Computing

Every September it seems like a new and very slightly improved edition of SPSS is released — this year is no exception, and in just a few weeks SPSS 15.0 will hit the streets with a few new minor features that may (or may not) improve the way your charts and graphs look; change the way you organize your data, and even provide you with a few additional statistical tools and programmatic capabilities that you never knew you were missing. So, am I going to rush out to order this new and exciting version? Probably not.

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