I've had mainly 3 reasons to switch to R: (1) It's free (2) It has a huge repositoriy of libraries. There's hardly anything that you can't do with R. In my sp

I've had mainly 3 reasons to switch to R: (1) It's free (2) It has a huge repositoriy of libraries. There's hardly anything that you can't do with R. In my special case it was about hazard-rate models, which are barely implemented in other tools that I tried (namely EViews, SPSS) (3) It has a BIG community behind it, which you can ask for help once you're stuck. I haven't found this kind of "service" in other software (namely, again, EViews).