500,000 Users, Long live LaTeX!

This article was originally published on the ShareLaTeX blog and is reproduced here for archival purposes.

Earlier this summer we hit the great milestone of 500,000 users with most of those users having come in the past 12 months alone. We want to say thank you to everyone for your support during the first few years.

When we started ShareLaTeX many people raised an eyebrow about us making such an old bit of technology core to our company. However we were quietly confident that LaTeX was still a fantastic tool which is core to thousands of peoples work. Many have tried and failed to replace TeX based systems, eventually someone will come up with something better but over 30 years later it is still the best system available for many scientist and academics. By open sourcing ShareLaTeX I hope it means we can be around as long as LaTeX.

Enabling collaboration between scientist has always been a core goal of ours. Using anonymised data we have done some very limited analysis of ShareLaTeX's user graph using our sister site DataJoy https://www.getdatajoy.com (update 21/02/2019: archival link only, DataJoy was shut down on 2nd Jan 2017). These graphs are just pieces of interest, not something to draw conclusions from. I've selected a few small corners of the network that interesting and worth a share.