What would you consider the worst piece of software you have used?

In the days when i worked we use to use Sage accounts software + a few special packages.

The thing that really used to p_ss  me off was they all used to claim on the box....EASY TO LEARN...total Bo*.*xx also the cost of yearly support,a total joke.

Mista H

Another vote for SAP at work.

For personal use i-tunes which seems at its worst if it is introduced as a 'johnny come lately' to a well ordered music library and let loose to wreak havoc.

Also Win 7 is not far behind mainly because the nice ways of doing things in XP went away.

Geoff

Does anyone remember using Display Write 4 in the 80s?  Impossible.

Nowadays - Windows media player.

Outlook is a struggle sometimes.  Why can't it have a simple file system to make backups easier?

I find itunes OK for managing my own mp3s.  I always set my firewall to stop it phoning home, and never buy anything.  Works fine for me.

As a web-builder I find having to satisfy all the recent incarnations of Internet Explorer an absolute pain.  You would think the people who invented the operating system could do better.

The all time nightmare that affected so many people has to be Windows Vista.

don

Aaargh! Lotus Notes - now there's a wretched piece of software.

Vista was a compete mare, as was Windows ME.

iTunes is a bit bloated, but works fine on OSX - on Windows of course it's a different matter.

A large number of video players, specifically Real, Windows Media Player and Winamp, are all garbage. Flash is horrible and the sooner it dies the better.

But the worst software it has ever been my misfortune to use was PageWright. In about 1990, in the early era of DTP, there were two industry-leading pieces of desktop publishing/layout software - Aldus Pagemaker and Quark. Unfortunately if worked on PCs as opposed to Macs (which the publishing company I then worked for did), you were stuck with PageWright, a programme of such pointless complexity and illogicality that it caused even the most hard-bitten subs to break down in tears. (For example: to create a drop capital at the start of an article, you had to write a piece of code. You had to write code for bold, indents, fonts, everything). Awful, just awful.

Another vote for itunes. Even when it works the user intergface is badly designed. In the end I gave my iPod to SWMBO just to avoid the bloody thing. Up side to this is that my phone sounds way better than the ipod did (using the itunes files dragged and dropped onto it).

Hoopla mobile. Needs no further explanation

SAP = Stops All Production. Had to use this in my last company for timesheets. Hideous, illogical, user-unfriendly interface. 

Lotus Notes. Company before that used it. Told them I was leaving to get away from it

Regards,

Willy.

Displaywrite did all right for me - I had quite a bit of travel from working on that product,

Lotus Notes - was a bit of a shock at first but I got great usage from it as a reference library source and as an rudimentary application base.  I also got a huge amount of travel from being associated with an app based on Notes as well as VM.

Hook, I really liked Siebel CRM, HOWEVER it's big downside was / is its very flexible, which means chaos normally reigns when the configurations are being planned, as everyone has to have thier say, and as such the config becomes overly complex and fraught with issues. A good siebel CRM implemtation works well and is good to use, they are however few and far between.

My fave programms were/are Wordstar, awk (the first commercial software I wrote was in Awk, very fond of it),  Adobe Lightroom and Borland Turbo Pascal, my alltime worst one was  Macromedia Dreamweaver.... Ie how best to make web design complicated.

Simon

SAP is in a league all of its own, for complete uselessness & lack of logic.

Makes anything else look superb by comparison.

Its scary that so many big companies run it. Mine has thrown away many useful systems & replaced them with some function in SAP. Horrid.

+1

Anything thats been near Bill Gates pleasuredome. Windows is worrying and the solution is have you rebooted? Wrong. Create a folder in explorer with dot prefix eg .myfolder

Nope, cant. Except you can...why write it like that?

Get a failed share mount and you cant have another go, it 'remembers' the bad info in its cache and wont let go til you reboot. Except you can fool it...again its been deliberately written to be user-hostile. I can imagine the design meetings they may have had.

One desktop is not the universe, however it concerns me greatly if they cant get the desktop right after all these years and manpower what on earth is happening with complex back-ends....

Never had the pleasure of SAP as a serious end user.