It’s not every day that Forbes publishes an article on market research.

This is why I was delighted to read Quentin Hardy’s piece on Norman Nie titled “Power in the Numbers.”

Nie co-invented SPSS (sold to IBM for $1.2 Billion last summer) and is now running the startup Revolution Analytics. He says his new product will undercut SPSS and SAS by 80%.

His new product will be based on R, an open source statistical programming language.

Simpler, cheaper analytics and the open source software movement collide…

This is a trend worth watching.