[Maarten Buis]

Maybe we should focuss a bit. Attaullah Shah: What do you want the outcome of this discussion to be?

[Attaullah Shah]

Thanks Maarten Buis for your question, and Nick for your answer. The question I posed to this forum came from reading the FAQs. I understand there are more important things to focus on and devote time to rather than argue on Stata or STATA. However, the FAQs deliberately asks for writing it Stata, but then I found some inconsistencies in the way it is capitalized in different places. Now that all the senior and tenured members agree that there is no inconsistency, I beg pardon for running down the rabbit trails.

[ben earnhart]

A bit off topic, but I support SPSS users and use SPSS sometimes myself (now that Stata S/E and M/P are the norm, and Stata *finally* has long strings, much less need for SPSS).

Anyway, back around SPSS 15, they came out with a huge service pack that... changed the name to PASW, and I think renamed a bunch of the internals to PASW, and added no functionality. People got really confused they couldn't find SPSS on their Start menu. So IBM, having spent a bunch of $ basically buying a brand name then ditching the name they paid for, switched back. Now it's still a *little* confusing, since it's "IBM SPSS Statistics" so it's out of the alphabetical order that people expect, but at least it references SPSS.