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The creators of some pieces technology need to be told that their products just don't measure up on some fundamental level. Here's some technology that I consider to be flawed.
1. QuickBooks
When QuickBooks accounting software works, it's great. But it's when it doesn't that things become nightmarish. Few pieces of software are so fussy about their network connection. The slightest hiccup can cause QuickBooks to throw in the towel and when that happens bad things can follow — such as the loss of valuable data. The biggest problem with QuickBooks is that when it breaks, sometimes the only resolution is to reinstall it. But even in the reinstalling, things can go wrong.
Image credit: Intuit
Talkback
How can you set it up wrong to intermittently connect? Should I be asking for more pay? Outlook/Exchange is a breeze.
Thanks for this list. Now I know, what to include on my system to make it more functional.
Interesting article and definitely see your points on the products mentioned. One of the top products for our Help Desk (approximately 20% of all calls) are related to Outlook 2010 which is very buggy. Exchange 2010 is also very buggy. Put the two together, and it's a bloated system that requires a lot of maintenance with usage, despite a lot of its good collaboration features. I would further estimate that about 60% of Outlook/Exchange 2010 issues are repetitive, while 40% are new and unique issues that come up. Also, Symantec Endpoint Protection is very buggy as well, mainly with the update engine and user interface. The scanning engine still seems to work fine without too much hassle.
The solution to all of this? Testing and more testing, research, and choosing the product that works best for your environment. Personally I've found open source software that has been established for a while to be very stable and bugs are fixed fairly quickly with new releases.
The product that scares me every time I have to use it is the Office 2007 version of Excel.
The first bug that I found was applying the median function to a union of two ranges. Between them the two ranges contained an odd number of integers. By definition the result had to be one of the integers contained in the union. However, Excel returned a non-integer result - instantly revealing that the result returned by the function was incorrect.
After that I found another three Excel 2007 functions that do not work properly. I've not bothered to remember them. Instead I have switched to using Libre Office Calc for serious number crunching.