Worst Software

[Galaxiom]

What is the worst software?

My top vote goes to Symantec's Veritas NetBackup.
It is ridiculously expensive. The interface is complex, clunky and unintuitive. Error messages tell very little and the help is virtually useless.

QuickBooks would rate pretty badly too. One of the most unintuitive interfaces I have encountered.

 

[Steve R.]

QuickBooks would rate pretty badly too. One of the most unintuitive interfaces I have encountered.

Since you brought-up Quick Books, an Intuit product. This raises a very interesting issue on what makes for for a "bad" program. My experience with Quicken and TurboTax, the products work, but the management of philosophy of Intuit is to milk the customer for every dime their worth, including the use of corporate dirty tricks.

1. You buy a program, such as Quicken to do your home accounting, I don't want to see ads. The program has ads for buying Intuit products and some of the menu bars are designed for the purpose of selling too.

2. If you "upgrade" to a newer version and don't like it. Yes you can return it to Intuit, but guess what. If you try to go back to your prior version, you can't!!

3. We bought a new computer and Quicken was provided as one of those idiotic "complimentary" programs. So I went to see if I could use it, guess what? If you already had Quicken, it would not read your existing Quicken data! So it was useless.

I could go on.

Anyway, as to what would appear to be my "worst" software experience, Dinotopia. The program, out of the box, never worked. The store would not take it back and it took forever to find the "right" contact. I believe we got our money back eventually. Why I remember? I bought it for my kids and it was immensely disappointing that it did not work.

 

[DCrake]

I remember years ago I bought Chartmaster for my dBase applications in order to create graphs. When installing it asked me what the size of my monitor was in inches. Then I found out it could not work on a machine that had over 40k in hard disk space. cost about £150 then and still never got it to work.

Another one was Borlands first attempt to come up with a windows version of dBase. The drag and drop of the tables in queries was pathetic. Then I found I could only include up to 6 tables in the structure. I think I had it installed for about 1 hour. Again that was £600. Good job it was the NHS that was paying for it.

 

[Yarp]

Norton Internet Security Suite - the subscription that came with the PC my sister brought expired, so it blocked access to the internet! Excuse me, if I want to surf with no security, what business is it of yours!!! Removed, and free software installed and immediately located issues that norton had missed.

 

[chergh]

I'd have to go with iTunes. What a complete piece of shit. I mean really I can only synch my iPod to 1 computer and as far as being a media player goes it is worse than useless. Also fuck off apple I don't want to install your shitty browser or any of your other crapware on my PC.

While I'm at it acrobat reader this thing is a huge POS. I don't let it near my computer these days and use foxit instead.

 

[Minkey]

I've come across so many in my time so won't list them but the absolute worse to install drove me mad, here's a summary:

Manually copy a dll to the machine (eh isn't that an installer is supposed to do)

Open and install 4 installation exe's separately (why 4 and more to the point separately ?)

Copy 2 ini files that we have stored on the network (these are for user preferences and application paths, why can't these be made as part of the setup ?)

Setup the ODBC Data source (SQL server) manually.

Make 2 changes to a 3rd ini file to change the application path of Excel.

Add and entry in the Environment Variables for temp files (for Excel).

Manually register 3 Active X controls.

It's a real pain in the (_._) but it does make me look good in front of the IT guys

Now I concede it's originally written for Windows 3.x but come on it still being used

Now the server side was even worse it ran about 13 separate exe's* some of which would randomly crash, removing functionality and if we ever powered it down (which we had to regularly) it would take at least 3 attempts to get it back up and running - blue screen of death, reboot, blue screen of death, reboot, go for cup of tea hey presto it's running.

*To add insult to injury when we got training on it the IT guys was like "ok this exe doesn't really do anything, we think, but the writers though it best not to remove in case something broke"

 

[GaryPanic]

I'd have to go with iTunes. What a complete piece of shit. I mean really I can only synch my iPod to 1 computer and as far as being a media player goes it is worse than useless. Also fuck off apple I don't want to install your shitty browser or any of your other crapware on my PC.

While I'm at it acrobat reader this thing is a huge POS. I don't let it near my computer these days and use foxit instead.

I think you had too much coffee - .....
chill baby chill ...

 

[Galaxiom]

Now that I have used Veritas NetBackUp (aka NotBackup) some more I can confirm it really is rubbish. The more I get to know it the more unbelivably ridiculous it appears.

The interface doesn't even provide a GUI implementation for several important functions. Believe it or not it requires DOS commands to erase tapes, change image expiry dates and refresh that expiry date in the database.

You have to go and find out about this yourself from online user groups. The stupid commands required are spread across different directories separated by multiple levels.

Its error messages are next to useless and it only appears to have two. It doesn't say what was wrong just that "the backup was not attempted".

On investigation of the file structure it looks like it was something a committee organised a group of students on work experience to write in 1989. It appears it was then kludged to work with a GUI (leaving out half the stuff that mattered).

However I must also give a dishonorable mention to the Novell Netware Administration interface ConsoleOne. What a kllunky unreliable load of crap. Half the time it neglects to load some of its tabs. And make sure you don't map the Z drive for something else or it will spit the dummy.

 

[Vassago]

Microsoft BOB, one of my friend's parents actually had it on her computer. It was JUST AWFUL! I don't really know how else to describe it.

 

[Simon_MT]

Bitmap Images!

Simon

 

[mcclunyboy]

I can list a few here but unfortunately I may get fired.

I don't particularly enjoy using Progress.....