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See this link: http://www.spss.com/corpinfo/history.htm It has a longer narrative describing THREE founders from the Stanford community.
IBM just purchased SPSS for $1.2 billion. It would be nice to have some information in the article about SPSS the company/organization: sales, employees, leadership, etc. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 14:53, 28 July 2009 (UTC)Reply
To quote Wellman, P71: "I propose the SPSS manual (Nie, Bent and Hull 1970) as our most influential book, for it was the SPSS statistical package that in the early 1970s revolutionized how sociology was done." Other books may have been proposed by other people but the statement is true. It could perhaps be modified to proposed as sociology's most influential book. Pterre (talk) 08:34, 29 September 2009 (UTC)Reply
This page should be moved to PASW. —Preceding unsigned comment added by StatisticalSoftware (talk • contribs) 07:27, 12 October 2009 (UTC)Reply
Because it is not called SPSS anymore. The SPSS software has ceased to exist and is now called PASW instead. —Preceding unsigned comment added by StatisticalSoftware (talk • contribs) 10:33, 12 October 2009 (UTC)Reply
The first sentence of the section "Ownership history" reads: "Between 2009 and 2010, the premier vendor for SPSS was called PASW (Predictive Analytics SoftWare) Statistics."
As far as I remember this is wrong and (more or less) backwards. For many years SPSS was both a product name and the name of the company which had SPSS as its original and main product. At some point between the launch of SPSS v. 17 which was called SPSS (according to my software archive) and PASW(/SPSS) v. 17.0.2 which (I believe) was the first version to be called PASW, the company SPSS decided to change the name of its main product to PASW and keep SPSS as the company name. I believe that SPSS wished to send a signal about being into "Predictive Analytics" (which they saw as a "hot" topic). They said something about that in the marketing and explanations for the name change.
Soon after they announced that IBM was buying the company SPSS. Later IBM changed the software name from PASW (back) to IBM SPSS.
Could somebody please simplify what precisely SPSS does? Each sentence links to another page which explains a different term.Can somebody just simplify everything by, for instance, explaining in simple terms what 'linear regression' is. I keyed on 'linear regression' to find out what it was and then I had to see what an 'affine function' was, and so forth. I'm still none the wiser as to what 'linear regression' is so could somebody put what these things are in parenthesis within this article? At present, the article is top heavy with terms when it should be explaining things to us, the general reader, who have to familiarize themselves with the program. Thanks. 213.94.216.10 (talk) 12:09, 10 January 2011 (UTC)Reply
The logo is that of "SPSS an IBM company", which according to the text no longer exists. Is there a quotation to verify this? Also Version 20 is shown in in the whateveritscalled on the right, but not mentioned in the versions subentry. I would correct this myself, but I am german and likely to get the details wrong. Tolloller (talk) 15:33, 12 October 2011 (UTC)Reply
Version 19.0 is referred to as IBM SPSS in the list of versions, but in the information overview box at the top of the page, it is referred to simply as SPSS. That is inconsistent.2MSE2 (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 12:40, 9 February 2014 (UTC)Reply
I would not quarrel with the removal of later details, but the fact that Nie was a political science postgraduate at Stanford when SPSS was developed seems perfectly relevant - SPSS was not developed by a software company but within the social science community. What were the other developers doing at the time? Pterre (talk) 09:40, 2 February 2012 (UTC)Reply
I am a novice wikipedia author, so I want to check with the community before making a change to the first sentence of a page. I propose adding the current product name in parentheses to the first sentence. I think that this might help people who are new to the statistics field; as they might wonder if "IBM SPSS Statistics" is the same thing as "SPSS". My proposed first sentence would read: SPSS (IBM SPSS Statistics) is a computer program used… What do others think?Karl (talk) 15:21, 6 November 2012 (UTC)Reply
The 2nd sentence of the "Statistics program" section claims that "SPSS is among the most widely used programs for statistical analysis in social science." This claim needs a citation to an independent source. I know that the annual KDnuggets surveys and the Rexer's Annual Data Miner Survey have shown in some years that SPSS is among the most widely used packages among data miners, but I do not know of a source for saying that SPSS is most widely used among social scientists. Does anyone know of such a reference?Karl (talk) 23:50, 11 November 2012 (UTC)Reply
An unsourced list of every features in the last fifteen versions? Seriously? Quite WP:UNDUE. If there is an independent reliable source then perhaps we could consider the highlights. Deltahedron (talk) 20:15, 22 November 2012 (UTC)Reply
I removed a long list of addons, related and complementary products as unsourced, undue and clear advertising. We can accept material about related products if it is discussed by independent reliable sources. Deltahedron (talk) 06:22, 11 April 2013 (UTC)Reply
I have removed the sentence "Today the name is pseudoacronymic, no longer standing for any expansion." since it does not cite a reliable source. The edit summary "I don't see anywhere at the IBM SPSS site where it claims to still stand for any expansion. If you can find such a page, I may be proved wrong" does not constitute sufficient reason to include it. If the company websiste says that it is not an acronym, that would suffice. Deltahedron (talk) 18:15, 13 February 2014 (UTC)Reply
The strong claim in the first sentence of the Overview section "SPSS is among the most widely used programs for statistical analysis in social science" was not supported by a citation. So I reduced the strength of this claim, replacing this text with the softer claim "SPSS is a widely used program for statistical analysis in social science." I personally agree that SPSS is probably among the most widely used stat packages in social science classrooms and labs, but I feel that a citation is needed before this strong claim should stay in the wikipedia entry. I know there are several social science research methods textbooks that use SPSS for the student exercises and examples, but that is the only thing I can think of to back up this "social science use" claim - however, that is just a personal observation and not something that can be cited. If others know of a good citation for the stronger claim, please reinstate the strong claim (along with the citation).Karl (talk) 23:39, 15 February 2014 (UTC)Reply
Does this article really need a list of every release of the software? If so, there needs to be citation to a reliable source. Deltahedron (talk) 16:53, 4 April 2014 (UTC)Reply
Dear User Tayste I could not figure out why you removed such a useful link. Please explain. Bellagio99 (talk) 02:15, 24 May 2017 (UTC)Reply
This article refers to the "original SPSS manual" and then puts (Nie, Bent and Hull) but this reference does not appear in the list of references at the end. Vorbee (talk) 07:41, 17 May 2018 (UTC)Reply
Added a Google books ref Clappingsimon (talk) 11:52, 17 May 2018 (UTC)Reply
If WP:RS can be found for IDA standing for Interactive Data Analyzer it would be worth adding this to the article. IDA was used on HP-2000 systems in several universities, such as Chicago where it was developed, for teaching regression analysis.Pi314m (talk) 23:52, 13 July 2021 (UTC)Reply
... which may be of interest to historians of the SPSS package.
I was working in a university biology department in 1983, when SPSS 2 came out. It quickly developed a really bad reputation. It was said to produce worthless, and obviously wrong, results. There was talk at professorial level of banning its use.
The problem was that previously, biologists recognised that they didn't understand statistics. If they needed to use statistics, they described their problem to a statistician, who did the calculations herself (or rather, got her computer do do them). But SPSS has a user-friendly interface. This allowed biologists to enter their data into the package themselves, without understanding what they were specifying. SPSS would answer the question they had asked rather than the one they had intended to ask, and generate a "wrong" result, which might or might not be recognised as such by the user. Maproom (talk) 08:16, 8 February 2023 (UTC)Reply