Jeromy Anglim's Blog: Psychology and Statistics


Tuesday, October 20, 2009

What's in a Name? 21st Century Problems: Searching for PASW version 18

Most people now know that IBM has acquired SPSS, and SPSS the software product has changed it's name to PASW. I have often observed name changes with interest. Kentucky Fried Chicken (at least in Australia) decided long ago to change its name to KFC, possibly because Kentucky was too American, Fried implied  fat and unhealthy food, and chicken was too limiting. Likewise, SPSS decided long ago to distance itself from being just a statistics package for the social sciences.

IBM has now released version 18 of PASW. I was trying to find out what were the new features in version 18, when I stumbled on a potential problem with the new name, and perhaps some reasons why IBM may want to move out of troubling teen version numbers as quickly as possible.


A Google search for: 'pasw "version 18"' reveals some rather problematic hits for most business users. PASW appears to be equivalent to password in Google. The screen shot shows results from result 6 onwards 20th October 2009: