Worst Software Nominations

I don't have any problems with Microsoft Office.

 

MS Office works perfectly fine on my MBP. Perhaps you have some other issue that needs to be addressed.

 

MS Office Word 2004 works fine by me.
Didn't try 2008 yet.

Only issue I got with 2004 is that if I open it (mostly via CMD+Tab, since it's opened already, just at the background), it's slow to load.
But once it's loaded, I'm good to go. (Until I switch again to another program. )

 

I had that problem which was solved by adding RAM. This was a while back so maybe dosn't apply to you. I'm talking 256 to 512 or 512 to 1GB on the first intel iMac.

To the OP... I've actually had decent luck with Office (both 2004 and 2008). Sure, it is bloated and loads slow. But once it gets going it has been pretty good.

I have noticed that Word 2004 (at least) leaks memory so it needs to be restarted occasionally. (My wife uses it heavily on a machine with 2GB of RAM and I tell her to restart it once a day, or so, and it's fine.)

If you have a lower end machine, I can understand what you're saying. But with a newer machine + 1 GB RAM, I don't thing you should see significant slow downs. Maybe give a little more info on when/how it slows down for you.

 

Office 2007, especially Word has an unresolved problem where it freezes at various levels of use. It doesn't affect all users and it happens at several places in use. There seems to be a haphazard response form the MBU and the MVPs have been flapping in the breeze trying to play whack a mole (and to be honest, taking user abuse that should go to MBU).

MS Office is the flagship office productivity package no matter what you think of it. It is the standard for which all other packages (iWork, OO) must be compatible or it's game over. Even if you don't have a problem yourself with Word, that freezing "feature" in itself makes Office 2008 the hands down winner (or is it looser). MS Office should fixing a problem that seems to have been present since the get-go. And they don't seem to be on their game.

 

Clearly you've never been exposed to Lotus Notes on the Mac.

 

iTunes. I mean what can you say about a program that spontaneously wants to erase all your music when you want to sync a few ringtones, takes forever to read files into its library, has poor support for audio and video formats, often has a hard time getting album artwork etc etc.

Adobe's whole CS4 suite is also rather crap considering it's a really expensive package meant for professionals. It's full of obscure errors and bugs caused by sloppy developers, poor user interface design, typos and text display issues, each program does the same things differently (different font dialogs, different keyboard shortcuts etc) and doesn't adhere to any MacOS design guidelines. But hey, at least it makes 3D hats!