In the meantime, some of the people at PTC got in touch with me to tell me that Mathcad is far from dying. These users feel that Mathcad brings something unique to the technical software landscape something that isn’t provided by the likes of Mathematica, MATLAB and Maple and they didn’t want it to go away. It quickly became apparent that there was a large user community who were fervently hoping that PTC would do something special with Mathcad rather than let it wither and die. The reaction from the user community ranged from people calling me some colourful names through to those who agreed with much of what I said and everything in between. The only sign of life over the last couple of years has been a few minor bug-fix releases which, to be perfectly frank, is rather insignificant compared to the competition.Īll of this led me to write an article back in June 2009 called ‘Is Mathcad Dying?’ which garnered quite a lot of feedback from both the Mathcad user community and from PTC themselves.
The first PTC-led release of the software, Mathcad 14, followed a few months later to mixed reviews and it’s been very quiet ever since. Ever since PTC bought Mathcad from its original developers, Mathsoft, back in 2006 the future for the product has been uncertain.
