Data is Free

Great article at The New York Times on R, the software environment for statistical computing and graphics. The article does a great job of capturing the history of R, and hints at what lies ahead.

The money quote is:

But while SAS plays down R’s corporate appeal, companies like Google and Pfizer say they use the software for just about anything they can. Google, for example, taps R for help understanding trends in ad pricing and for illuminating patterns in the search data it collects. Pfizer has created customized packages for R to let its scientists manipulate their own data during nonclinical drug studies rather than send the information off to a statistician.

With cloud computing, virtualization, and open source software like R the costs of serving content and analyzing data for media companies is rapidly approaching zero. That's good news since it frees up the media companies to do what they should be good at: producing content to attract eyeballs.