Who cares? Wolfram|Alpha is a pretty nice service (disappointing compared to the grandiose announcements, sure, but nice nonetheless) and even if it weren't, DDG wouldn't be negativly affected all that much.
Now, if W|A were to fund a genocidal maniac there would be a point to boycotting DDG – but for Wolfram being an asshole?
I was a talk by Stephen Wolfram at MIT in fall of 2010 about Wolfram Alpha. Never spoke to him personally. When Wolfram answered questions he was always direct and gave grounded answers -- not dreams.
More than once he had to remind people that a lot of the shortcomings they point out are not trivial. It's easy to see how someone could interpet him as egotistical for this. But Wolfram seemed much more focused on building a product now and making it better as you learn from customers.
Wolfram is not trying to make everyone happy. It seemed like is he is trying to build something he loves doing and see if others find it useful.
Why would the creator personality figure into your support of a service at all? If you only consumed the output of humble artists/inventors/writers/entrepreneurs, you'd live a fairly impoverished life.
(Is there a name for discounting a company/product based on the creator rather than its merits? Or is ad hominem sufficiently applicable here, as well?)
A major corporation with an arrogant CEO who received a Ph.D. in particle physics from the California Institute of Technology at age 20,joined the faculty there, and received one of the first MacArthur awards in 1981, at age 21. Lets cut him some slack for being awesome.
He is, nonetheless, considered insufferably arrogant even by the standards of other geniuses (and CEOs).
Does any of this matter for his products? Naah. Mathematica and Alpha are good, and as for A New Kind Of Science... well, I doubt I'll ever bother to read enough of it to find out.
maybe you should look into the time he was sued by all his employees. and i don't meant the rule 110 thing, which was pretty lame, i'm talking about the one where he created a shell company and signed over the key assets they had all created in order to make the employees equity worthless. yea, fraud.
I'm not sure what the direct relationship between the arrogance of Stephen Wolfram has to do with Wolfram Research.
Wolfram is outspoken about his work on cellular automata, which a lot of people think is overblown, but his company's work stands on it's own- and it's quite good.
