You answered yourself in your own question. As long as you’re addicted to doing X with them, why should they care what you think? X dealers aren’t your friends.
That said try other software. Maybe something does X for you without all the stress. For example Foxit Reader is just a few megs, but reads PDFs just as well as acrobat reader in my experience.
Also if you need itunes to handle an Apple Abomination against all that is good and decent, er I mean an Apple Device, then winamp has an ipod sync plug in.
Also paint.net is about 3 megs but works pretty dang well for image editing. Depending on your needs it might do everything photoshop does (if that’s what you use) for you.
So, you consider Office 2007 a streamlined, elegant, suite? Interesting.
It doesn’t suck because Microsoft is eeeevil. It sucks because of business requirements. Open Office and other such things (I’ve never tried the Google stuff) can do 97% of what people want to do. How to get the sales they need? Add a zillion new features, change the interface, and break compatibility with previous versions. I got it because I am collaborating with someone doing a fairly complex thing, and Office 2003 would never get all the features right. It’s not that we need the features that came with 2007 - this same document has been done for years with the older version.
It’s not just software that has this problem. IBM, when they were still making laptops, looked at requests for new features from their users. They discovered that lots of them were already there, but they were buried under so many menu layers that the average user never found them.
This is a really good point. While people may complain about software bloat, they rarely ever actually make purchasing decisions based on it. And in most cases it doesn’t make sense to spend engineering time making a download smaller, or making the memory footprint smaller, unless it’s so large that it seriously impacts the average user. The reason it doesn’t make sense is that in a year or two, the average computer will be twice as fast and twice as big, and if you wasted time optimizing things that aren’t really important (and, unless you’re Google, download time qualifies as not really important) instead of adding new features, someone else will come along and do a better job at what matters.
Note that even in the case of Google, which is figuring out how to do incremental binary updates in very small files, it’s their bandwidth that’s probably more important, not your time downloading.
Some software out there is really excellent stuff, because the maker has a clear and useful and elegant idea in mind of what the software should do. If the software tries to do a pretty distinct and well thought out job, and excels at that, and manages to avoid a lot of extras that don’t fit well or that create competing and contradictory mental pictures of what it is the software does, it is a great pleasure to use. I am thinking of a text editor I like, and a CAD program (especially the way it was a few years ago), and a finite element solver. I think Mathematica, the math software, is an example of this too (though I’m not good enough at it to be sure really).
Really nice software can give you a stronger and more useful way to think about the thing you are doing. It can make your head more efficient even when you are not computing.
Yes indeed! Good software is designed, unlike growing randomly like a coral reef. You also have to accept the necessary complexity of the job it does.
I went to a panel once, called something like “Why do EDA Tools Suck.” The poor guy from the industry said something very insightful: “if you designers got an EDA tool which did everything you wanted it to, most of you would be out of jobs.”
I’ve been both an EDA developer, EDA user, and EDA purchaser/evaluator, and it is more fun to be a user/ purchaser - you get treated to lunch a lot more often.
