[Banter] What is the worst software you have used for its price?

[RedLion]

We all have a software that we like to hate. What is yours?

At my new job, we use Mentor Xpedition for PCB design, which I am told costs cool 6 figures on the free market, and the user interface is absolutely horrifying. I am genuinely baffled at just how bad it is, coming from an Altium background, which is less than 10% of the price! (granted that UI is not perfect either)

I wonder how you arrive at the decision to buy such an expensive piece of bloatware that looks and feels like it was designed by some hobbyist for DOS, it is dog slow and clunky, and if you want to, say, turn your schematic into a PCB, you have to open another program, which is even slower, and has an even worse UI.

I mean, if freeware is a bit crap, you deal with it, because it's free, but why is anyone spending that much money on that bad of a software?

[jogri]

Probably Keithleys KickStart software, they charge over 1.000 € for it and it's actually hilarious how bad that software is: They sell dataloggers for 2-5k, but the software (that you have to buy extra) can't even take a measurement every second without drifting like crazy. You can only specify the amount of time between measurements, but the time it takes to take a measurement randomly fluctuates by like 10-20 milliseconds. If you want to take a measurement every second you have to specify a delay of ~850 ms between measurements since a single measurement takes roughly 150 ms and then fine tune that delay and just pray that the timing works out somehow (it will not).

The 20 year old free HP software on the other hand is perfect: You just tell it that you want a measurement every second and it times it perfectly down to a fraction of a ms.

[RedLion]

Probably Keithleys KickStart software, they charge over 1.000 € for it and it's actually hilarious how bad that software is: They sell dataloggers for 2-5k, but the software (that you have to buy extra) can't even take a measurement every second without drifting like crazy. You can only specify the amount of time between measurements, but the time it takes to take a measurement randomly fluctuates by like 10-20 milliseconds. If you want to take a measurement every second you have to specify a delay of ~850 ms between measurements since a single measurement takes roughly 150 ms and then fine tune that delay and just pray that the timing works out somehow (it will not).

The 20 year old free HP software on the other hand is perfect: You just tell it that you want a measurement every second and it times it perfectly down to a fraction of a ms.

Wow, that sounds like it runs on bootlegged LabView

[VK3DRB]

iTunes. Even being free, it is way overpriced.

[KaneTW]

We all have a software that we like to hate. What is yours?

At my new job, we use Mentor Xpedition for PCB design, which I am told costs cool 6 figures on the free market, and the user interface is absolutely horrifying. I am genuinely baffled at just how bad it is, coming from an Altium background, which is less than 10% of the price! (granted that UI is not perfect either)

I wonder how you arrive at the decision to buy such an expensive piece of bloatware that looks and feels like it was designed by some hobbyist for DOS, it is dog slow and clunky, and if you want to, say, turn your schematic into a PCB, you have to open another program, which is even slower, and has an even worse UI.

I mean, if freeware is a bit crap, you deal with it, because it's free, but why is anyone spending that much money on that bad of a software?

The user interface is a relic of the past, as with a lot of software.  The main strength of Xpedition lies in its rules engine, simulation capabilities, and team support.

I work on pretty high speed designs. As I work alone, Altium is my preferred choice because there's just too much auxillary work to be done in Xpedition. But all the vendors expect Xpedition/Cadence/Zuken and sometimes you run into things that Altium's rules engine doesn't support well and it's annoying.

[tom66]

Mentor Graphics PADS. 

It crashes, freezes, introduces catastrophic errors into gerbers, and lacks many modern design tools (proper 'tagged' DRC, impedance and length-matched routing, net-class design rules, proper 3D modelling etc.), yet is still widely used in the electronics industry.   

I hate it so very much.  It costs several thousand pounds a seat and yet KiCAD is clearly superior in nearly every way.  We're probably going to go the way of Altium though, cost wise it's a bit more, but it's not worth the saving to use something like PADS, given how much of a time sink it is.

Also, the name particularly sucks, as try to Google anything like "PADS how to change track width" and tons of unrelated articles about PCB design come up because "pads" are common on PCB designs.   This would be a minor issue but for the fact that the internal help program is even more useless than the software itself.

I'm pretty sure it was written for a Commodore 64 and all that's changed since then is a vague port to Windows.

[tszaboo]

orcad 

[ajb]

Wow, I came here to say Altium.  I haven't dabbled in the others, but my impression has been that they all tend to have a worse user experience or are missing a lot of the graphical control options that Altium has (even if most of what Altium has is half-baked and half-broken), which is part of what has me still putting up with it. 

[madires]

Objectel, really expensive (especially the mods) and cumbersome to use (an understatement).

[Benta]

M$ Windows. All versions.

[Gregg]

SAP accounting program
Over bloated and ridiculous; it would take  a full day to do what should have taken 15 minutes 

[YurkshireLad]

IBM Jazz....

[Slh]

IBM DOORS. It's a horrible program made even worse by the license server that kicks you out if you lose the network for 30 seconds (usually by undocking your laptop...). It's also the price of a decent car.

[YurkshireLad]

IBM DOORS. It's a horrible program made even worse by the license server that kicks you out if you lose the network for 30 seconds (usually by undocking your laptop...). It's also the price of a decent car.

Oh God, I completely forgot about Doors,  Clearcase and Clearquest!!

[bd139]

HP / CoCreate WorkManager. See: http://www-eng.lbl.gov/~als/WorkManager/Training_Materials/Intro_to_WM/

There are still open sores of this in the descendent product: Creo Elements / DMM.

It was like lord Cthulhu had intimate relations with a demon and given birth to something even more heinous which had written it. It was so good that I actually wrote a complete new UI for the back end Oracle database and it improved their life so much that they actually shed tears. Usually it's because I ruined their lives or made them unemployed but nope, this was tears of joy.

Oh and Powershell.

[james_s]

iTunes. Even being free, it is way overpriced.

I quite liked iTunes back around 2005, then they completely ruined it over the next decade or so, worse with every version.

[tszaboo]

SAP accounting program
Over bloated and ridiculous; it would take  a full day to do what should have taken 15 minutes 

Actually, true. Although I have no idea how much actually SAP costs, but guessing a lot, since they send consultants to set up the software constantly.

[bd139]

iTunes. Even being free, it is way overpriced.

I quite liked iTunes back around 2005, then they completely ruined it over the next decade or so, worse with every version.

It actually doesn't exist on the Mac now. Only windows users have to suffer it 

Mac users have Apple Music which is, well 90% less buggy.

[free_electron]

All the Linux flavors and the whole ecosystem around it. fork fork fork , but never fix the root issues. There 315 different versions all with different user interface, different ways to install applications , different package managers. install one thing , break another .

I'm not talking open source in general. there are good open source programs. Inkscape comes to mind.

[Gerhard_dk4xp]

HP Pascal for the 8085 / Z80.

I wrote a program to sweep the beam of an ultrasonics phase array
and control it via GPIB/488 in Turbo Pascal. So far, so good. Really good.

I expected a day to compile it on the HP16000 mini computer with
in-circuit emulator. That turned out to be 4 weeks. We must have been
the (paying) alpha tester and 1st. customer ever.

It was unable to parse legal standard Pascal source and generated wrong
code for the rest. In effect, I re-wrote my program in assembler.

BTW, happy user of Linux Mint here.  RedHat was nice, too.
We ran a system of >10 million lines of source code on it, a mix
of many languages.

[eugene]

I don't know what the worst program is, but I'll bet it requires a subscription license.

[free_electron]

ooh. i got another one. LabWindows on Solaris.

Install it. make small program that contains endless loop.
how do we stop it ? consult manual . hit ctrl-alt-delete ... the manual provided was for the windows version... there was no manual for the sun version ... oopsie.. so what now ?
find the process id. kill ..... doesn't work ... kill -9 ... doesn't work.. call tech support ....  "uh, we don't know . Very few people use the Solaris version, we have no experience with this. Can't you just power cycle the machine ?" (The machine was in the middle of some simulations that had been running for a while...)

i will never forget the sysadmins look on his face, just as i will never forget what happens to a CD-ROM when you fold it in half. Broken cd-rom , ripped apart manual went back to national instruments with an accompanying letter containing very colorful verbage and threats of inserting said broken CD into the back orifice of whoever wrote the thing and the statement : keep that shit out of my computer room !

[Bud]

Linux.

[Messtechniker]

Keysight Benchvue. Much to convoluted.   
Too many background tasks slowing things down.
Can't say much about the UI, because I quickly
un-installed this huge thing, to put it politely.

[bd139]

Linux.

Particularly the boot process and desktop.