Microsoft's latest operating system, while easy to use, has a nearly fatal flaw: It is so insecure immediately after install that it's likely that a brand new computer will have acquired a virus within thirty minutes of being attached to a high-speed internet connection. They do have patches available for this problem - but you need to connect to the internet to get them; so you probably get the virus in the process. Gee, that's brilliant.
Application software? Sure, we got lots of the for your computer! Easy to use, too. Well, actually, it's not really all that easy to use to do anything sophisticated. And it will try to guess what you're doing and help you do it better - but it always does it wrong! It's amazing to me how often Microsoft Word manages to do exactly what I don't want it to do. It only has three automatic formatting options that I like: automatic numbered lists; automatic bulletted lists, and getting me the hell out of list mode when I press delete on a blank line of a list. Microsoft Excel? Sure, it's great at getting the job done, but have you looked at the size of the files it creates? I've created some pretty nice Excel spreadsheets with macros in them that clearly need to take up a lot of room, but I do not 20 kilobytes to store a list of 6 numbers! (And Word is just as bad; I just had more annoying things to complain about in Word.)
Internet Explorer? More like Internet Exploder! I don't mind have a lot of features in my web browser - but I use the full-featured Mozilla browser because it has about 1/4 as many critical security holes as Microsoft's browser. And when a fix is needed, it's often available within 48 hours of the hole being discovered. Microsoft waits for it to go through QA, which could take a couple of months...most of which is probably spent tracking down original reports of bugs that they knew about when they released the damn thing the first time!
...and now I will get to the real culprits: PowerPoint and Outlook. Instead of writing a long scathing screed about PowerPoint, I'll just point you to this article that tells you that it makes people dumb! (It's on the New York Times website, you may have to lie to them about who you are for them to let you in.) Now I can get on to my scathing screed about Outlook.
First of all, it lets you embed so-called "rich text" into your e-mail - this includes graphics. This is WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG because even with the world's best computer and internet connection, you will still like you're "bandwidth poor" even if your text is rich. (Hey, maybe that's where all my money went - the rich text stole it! That's how it got rich!) When I open an e-mail, it should open pretty much instantly. If the e-mail is over 100KB, there had better be quite a few paragraphs there.
Second, it encourages that awful awful awful habit of quoting a previous e-mail without editing it. This causes two problems: That "rich text" is getting ever richer - because there's way more of it than there needs to be - and it's really hard to figure out what the fuck you people are talking about! Before they lowered the minimum IQ of internet users to about 30, the rules for quoting were as follows: Quote the relevant bits (including the original sender's name and the date if replying to multiple people), cut out the rest, and include your new text AFTER the quoted bit. That way, if you've been following the discussion, it's easy to check who is being replied to; and if you haven't, it's easy to tell what the discussion is about without having to scroll to the bottom of 18 quoted-in-full page-and-a-half e-mails and read through each of them even though there are only two or three relevant sentences in each one.
And one more thing about Microsoft that annoys me: That fucking butterfly! Kill the bastard! Spray him with some RAID and we'll be rid of his evil forever!