[primitivesuave]

I think the strategy of Wolfram Research has shifted from trying to sell Wolfram Alpha as a standalone service, to selling the Wolfram Language with WA functions for retrieving standard datasets. A finance professional, for example, probably did not gain much information from asking WA "would it be better to invest $100 in GOOG or FB in 2013?", but the `FinancialData` function for pulling end-of-day stock prices enabled these people to do interesting analysis that they couldn't have done otherwise.

(source: conjecture, but I did work at WR for 3 years and on the initial Wolfram|Alpha release)

[gfodor]

What was your experience at WR? I’m curious what the sentiment is towards the new physics work by those who work there, do you stay in touch?

[primitivesuave]

Overall very positive, Stephen is a brilliant visionary and the software (Mathematica back then) was the best thing for someone early in their career to work on. Some of the ideas I picked up around symbolic computing and functional programming were quite helpful later on, and the whole experience opened some doors that wouldn't have otherwise. It's almost been a decade, so I unfortunately don't have much insight into sentiment these days.