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What's the Most Useless or Wasteful Software You've Ever Encountered?

Useless software is frustrating, especially when it comes to wasting time and resources. As developers, we come across various software applications throughout our careers, and some are helpful while others are a waste of time.

What's the most useless or wasteful software you've ever encountered, and why? Let's discuss and explore ways to avoid them in the future.


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Top comments (13)

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mistval profile image
Randall

Lotus Notes, also known as Blotus Notes.

It used to be a popular email system in the corporate world in the late 2000s and early 2010s or so. It was made by IBM and you could think of it as the IBM version of Gmail or Outlook.

It had email of course, plus calendars and scheduling, chat, and... a whole lot of other things.

What was most stupid about it is that it was built on top of Eclipse. Yes, the Java IDE. They built an email client on top of a Java IDE. This still sounds nuts to me, but as far as I know there are a number of other programs that did this too, so honestly I'm probably just missing something. But it sounds pretty silly on the face of it.

It had a ton of other features like spreadsheets and "databases", forums, auth stuff, and custom applications. The interface was extremely cluttered. It took ages to launch.

Basically it tried to do everything. It was obviously an extremely ambitious project, and probably ahead of its time in some ways. But the world chose to go more in the direction of having different, more specialized tools for every job, and I think it's better that way.

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philipjohnbasile profile image
Philip John Basile

NFT

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

99% of crypto

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liftoffstudios profile image
Liftoff Studios

I agree, it's quite useless and only a huge money maker for the rich/early adopters

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ingosteinke profile image
Ingo Steinke, web developer

anything released by Microsoft except Visual Studio Code, but especially Teams

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fyodorio profile image
Fyodor

OS Windows

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aarone4 profile image
Aaron Reese

And on the flip side, databases put together by front end Devs are normally a complete dogs-breakfast. Even if they manage to stick to a naming convention and get the 3rd normal form correct, there will be no indexes, referential integrity or correct data typing (String is not a data type!). And don't get me started on Collation...

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jmfayard profile image
Jean-Michel 🕵🏻‍♂️ Fayard • Edited

It's hard to say because after all, we are taking about tools and tools can either be used wisely, it used badly, or tools can use you.

For example Facebook is on average a mixed bag sometimes interesting but usually wasting your time.
In the best case scenario it can also be a profitable way to build your business if you know what you are going
In the worst case scenario it can be a catastrophe that damages your mental health.

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ferceg profile image
ferceg

Most of my code, lol :)

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stalwartcoder profile image
Abhishek Mishra

Antiviruses :D, and I don't wanna name "clippy" from Microsoft :P

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theaccordance profile image
Joe Mainwaring

YO

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