WordPress. The buggiest, ugliest (in terms of code) piece of shit on Earth. And somehow it managed to get almost 50% all website traffic... (with all the revenue that this means)
Netsuite comes to mind. Enterprise software. Charges hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. It tries to be everything to everyone which makes it really slow. And the menu has 500 options so it's hard to navigate.<p>For what it's worth, it has made me say "Wow, that is really cool and useful!" more than a few times but also very often "WTF! Why does this take so long! This is a common operation!" and "Why is this so unnecessarily complex!"<p>The API is SOAP and routinely takes 5+ seconds to do a common operation like "Create order" - and ad hoc searches can take minutes.<p>Business people like it because it gets them every critical piece of business operations data they need at their finger tips but also hate it because of the hundreds of thousands they ultimately pay consultants to deal with the complexity.<p>Runner up: Jira<p>A lot of people say Wordpress but I think a lot of the Wordpress UI is good design. Which is part of why it's popular. It is just really slow (unless you spend a LOT of time optimizing). So Netsuite wins for being both slow AND poorly designed.<p>Edit: That said I can't say that I wouldn't recommend Netsuite. If you are a multi-national corporation (or even a large domestic one) and sell or manufacture a physical product, and have the time and money to pay the licensing fees and the consultants it does everything you could possibly want and more. If someone asked me for a recommendation I'd say: "It's great but don't expect it to be perfect day one. It will take a year with possibly multiple full time consultants to get everything where you want it to be."
I can believe no one's said Oracle database. I keep thinking it's dead in favor of FOSS alternatives, but every large business I consult at has racks and racks dedicated to that tire fire, and a bunch of aging ODBAs itching to retire. And, Larry's still making an absolute fuckton of cash from it.
You might want to take a look at <a href="http://dreckstool.de/hitlist.do" rel="nofollow">http://dreckstool.de/hitlist.do</a>
There is a nice ranking there...<p>("Dreckstool" = sh*tty tool)
Clearcase. I used to think Perforce was a bad VCS until I had the misfortune of having to use Clearcase. Perforce is no spring chicken, but it's a breath of fresh air compared to CC. And of course open source VCS'es like git and svn are light years ahead of both of these.
Almost anything designed by (or at the behest of) a TV network. From set-top box software to web platforms to mobile apps. They always want to shoehorn their long antiquated paradigms into everything they make.
Everything Qualys. A simple task that I need to accomplish regularly which should take 30 minutes tops requires a full day almost everytime (despite building an internal wiki for the process with all edge cases).
Wouldn't anyone on this site, if they had the knowledge of that, make a competing product?<p>Or perhaps some of us are?<p>That's a fairly lazy question, and I cannot see how it would really start a good conversation.
Coinbase.<p>Their webapp and mobile app are full of lies and bugs. Sometimes they won't take your money but they say they did, sometimes they take 5x extra money from your account, etc. Making billions though.