MATLAB Pricing

MATLAB is a great tool.  I use it every day and have few complaints.  However, I’d like to use it for personal purposes.  The price of MATLAB makes its use for personal purposes cost prohibitive.  As of Sept. 14th, 2008 the prices are

• MATLAB: $1900
• Simulink: $3000
• Control System Toolbox: $1000
• Signal Processing Toolbox: $800

This is the basic MATLAB package I’ve always had as a professional.  Sometimes I have other toolboxes but I always have at least these.  Can most of us afford $6700 for personal use?

The MATLAB Monopoly

If MATLAB had any real competition, would the price still be $1900 for just MATLAB?  There are 2 competitors that I know of and neither is really a true competitor.  The first competitor is OCTAVE a free MATLAB like program.  In my brief examination of OCTAVE for use on my website I found it to be lacking most of the functionality of MATLAB.  The second competitor I come across is SimApp.  I’ve been in contact with a marketing person here in Colorado for SimApp and the price I was given was $500.  They have several licenses but I haven’t dug around the site to see what license you get for $500.  SimApp is a much smaller application with much less to it than MATLAB.

The purpose of SimApp is to offer only what we need most of the time and to do so at a reasonable price.  Mathworks offers items in toolboxes for the same purpose – at I assume that’s why.  However, their prices aren’t reasonable.

Is there justification for MATLAB’s price?

Like Microsoft, Mathworks is the only game in town and they set whatever price they want.  The price is high and I don’t like it but is it justified?

The Mathworks updates MATLAB about twice a year.  For the most part it is bug fixes and minor improvements.  Very rarely is there serious new functionality included in these updates.  For MATLAB 2008a the major upgrade is in Object Oriented programming.  The new interface is light years better than the old but the functionality isn’t new.

Most of the improvements I heard of over the last couple of years have involved improved plotting tools.  Some tools are new like a GUI interface to allow for interactive regression on the plot.  The other plotting improvements are bug fixes in my opinion (i.e. bugs like the aspect ratios not remaining fixed in certain uses of the saveas function).  After all these years, they still haven’t gotten the bode plot right in my opinion.

Conclusion

This latest round of installations for MATLAB 2008a really made me and a lot of my coworkers very angry.  There was a lot of extra work to get it installed.  And the only reason for our having the extra was that Mathworks didn’t do the work themselves.  In essence Mathworks let the users do beta testing of the MATLAB 2008a installation process on a full release version.  Kind of like every new Microsoft operating system, this program wasn’t ready for general release.

Since many of us who use and love MATLAB have long been cranky about the price for an individual license, there is some latent hostility and strong beliefs about knocking the chip off Mathworks’ shoulder.

MATLAB is a great program and every company has a right to set their own price to maximize profit.  That doesn’t mean users have to happy about it.  Companies with real competition worry more about irritating their customers.  That or they go out of business.

P.S.: 64 bit MATLAB

I have a 64 bit Quad core PC.  I installed 64 bit MATLAB on it.  However, anything in Simulink that requires a compiler doesn’t work.  Mathworks doesn’t ship a compatible compiler.  The only compiler compatible with Simulink on a 64 bit installation is a special installation of Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2005 Professional.  It seem kind of silly to install a $300 program just for the compiler.

Obviously, Mathworks should have included a compatible compiler.  The tech support was very helpful in this but only after I got nasty with them.  And the first level tech suggested more than one incorrect fix and this got to be time consuming.

Control System Modeling: Purpose

I’m going to use model and simulation as synonyms in this post.

The purpose of modeling in any discipline, including control systems, is to answer a question; often a very specific question is answered.  There are several reasons for why any given model only answers a small set of questions.  Budget and Schedule.

Modeling Complexity

Budget and schedule force engineers to model only those aspects deemed necessary to answer the question posed.

Modeling the universe in detail – even the very localized universe around a small object – takes a lot of work and time.  Budget and schedule concerns always force engineers to start with first principles and then model progressive deeper levels of details and fidelity.  The deeper layers are only modeled if the desired level of result accuracy requires this extra fidelity.

There are several reasons for keeping a model as simple as possible:

1. Initial time to development goes up with complexity
2. Time required for maintanence goes up with complexity
3. Odds of a mistake go up with complexity
4. Time between simulation start and delivery of results goes up with complexity

My observation is that items #1 through #3 increase roughly exponentially with complexity.  Turn around time (#4) increases but the amount of increase is highly dependent on the slowest part of the model as it exists prior to the increase in fidelity.

Control System Modeling: Pitfalls

Expanded Purpose

Engineers and other professionals who do not create or run simulations on a regular basis often forget about the narrow focus of a good model.  As a result these people often ask for results the model is not designed to produce.  Obviously the engineer being asked for the results needs to consider the request very carefully.  There may be an assumption built into the model which invalidates its use for this expanded purpose.

Juggling Programs

Each day that I work on a model I go through a process of “loading my RAM” or short term memory.  In order to work on the model and produce meaningful results a certain number of details and parameters must be loaded up into short term memory.  I find this process takes no more than 30 minutes and rarely takes more than 45 minutes.

The pitfall is in assuming you can juggle certain types of work.  Last summer I was asked to juggle modeling work and hardware maintanence work.  The hardware work needed me for 30 minutes at a time about 4 or 5 times a day.  As a result the hardware work repeatedly interrupted my efforts on the modeling work.  The interruptions came about every hour and a half.  So I used half of my time in between “loading my RAM”.

After about 2 or 3 weeks of trying to juggle the hardware and the modeling work I realized I was never gonig to get anything done on the model if I didn’t set some limits.  I asked the two programs how they wanted me to handle the problem.  The basic response was just deal with it.  So I decided to tell the hardware guys that 2 days a week they couldn’t bother me, except for emergencies.  No one was happy but it was the best I could do.