Julia competes with the scientific computing aspect of matlab, which is easily the worst part of matlab and the one which the easiest to replace.

Companies do not buy matlab to do scientific computing. They buy matlab, because it is the only software package in the world where you can get basically everything you ever want to do with software from a single vendor.

In addition: Simulink, the documentation (which is superb), and support from a field application engineer is essentially a support contract and phone call away.

I say this as someone who’d be quite happy never seeing Matlab code again: Mathworks puts a lot of effort into support and engineering applications.

It is hard to explain that to people here.