I am sure it's not a surprise I am commenting on this post.

I have never had an issue with SAS creating innovative products, but I have outlined my concerns (WRS Forum) that Visual Analytics has diverted development away from the bread and butter SAS EBI platform, particularly WRS. There are many fundamental problems with the EBI platform that I would have hoped SAS focused their attention on. It is hard for me to get excited with Visual Analytics given our organization needs a robust medium sized data solution rather than a high performance and expensive big data solution. It would be hard to justify us ever putting the resources needed not only to install the hardware for Visual Analytics, but also to maintain it. Furthermore, most of our analytics tasks can be performed in an adequate amount of time without needing in memory processing on multiple cores. I would rather have that slick Visual Analytics web interface in Web Report Studio now, rather than having to wait months for it to be retrofitted (if that is even going to occur).

I think your analogy of the moon landing project is a good one (and forgive me if I push this too far). Billions of dollars were invested in getting man to the moon in what everyone thought at the time was a worthy mission, and would lead to bigger and better things for manned space exploration. However, in the end, the USA spent a lot of money, and invested a lot of time running a race that in hindsight did not need to be won, and which was basically for "show". Whilst there was some flow on effects, those big, overpowered rockets were decommissioned; the number of missions cut short, and investment was made in more sustainable technology. Unfortunately, even the Space Shuttle was overly complicated, and full of bugs that not only caused constant delays, but failure to fix has lead to disasters. In the end, it is those reliable rockets that do the day in day out work of putting satellites into space that have proved the most useful. But they don’t usually make the headlines.

Perhaps in 5 years all of this will pay off, and even I will be thankful SAS invested in it. But right now, investment in the current EBI platform is what I think is needed.

Nick