Could you provide a citation that Mathematica has "if not thousands of professional engineers working full time on it", please? I also find the claims of 100s dubious. But I'm interested.
Wikipedia.org states that Wolfram Research has 400+ employees. Given typical software company staffing levels, they probably have apx 100 people working on product development.
For comparison, similar software companies include MathWorks, the publishers of Matlab, with 2,400 employees and SAS Institute with 12,000 employees.
So just to ballpark this, if the average salary is $50,000 and the total cost of employment is $100,000 per year that makes for a run rate of $40 million per year. Over 24 years, assuming average no of employees was half that, that's about $500 million in sunk costs.
Totally made up numbers, but any chance I'm within a factor of 2? Posted only so somebody who knows what they're talking about can ridicule me with actually realistic numbers.
It's probably mor like 1/2 that (engineers). I live in Champaign (Wolfram's HQ), and know several current and former employees.
Mathematica development is split into two main groups. The Math Kernel group has about 20-30 engineers, and the FE group is around 10-15. There's a handfull of developers floating around that work on mathlink (a communication lib that allows external apps to hook into the math kernel).
Overall, they're actually a fairly efficient company. I can't speak to the current state of their finances, but I do know that about ten years ago (just after Methematica 5) they were running at about $24M gross anual revenue for the U.S, about $30M for asia, and $12M for U.K.
That low number just makes Mathematica all the more impressive, especially considering that I wasn't nearly as impressed with my brief experience with Matlab. On the other hand, I use neither regularly, and SAS and MathWorks probably do other stuff too :P
