You might want to take a look at http://dreckstool.de/hitlist.do There is a nice ranking there... ("Dreckstool" = sh*tty tool)
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Ask HN: What's the worst-designed, slowest app that still makes a lot of money?
101–107 of 107 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's the worst-designed, slowest app that still makes a lot of money?
#102Clearcase. 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.
Jesus yes! Clearcase is the only software that ever made me cry actual tears of rage and frustration. I haven't used it in years, but in a prior incarnation at Informix had to use Clearcase multi-site. I think we lost about 10 plus company wide workdays that year due to Clearcase outages. Every developer ended up writing their own 300 line spec file so no builds were ever reproducible. Oh yeah, the "VOBS" got corrupted so they had to move all the sources to an entirely new Clearcase installation, but could not move the history. They kept the old installation online read-only to serve history. But mainly, it was incredibly slow and since it provided the repos as a filesystem that meant builds were slow too. To build the product from the top on a workstation took about 40 minutes. To build from Clearcase was over 8 hours. Basically, touch a header file and your workday is over.
Ima stop now, cause it still makes me mad.
Re: Ask HN: What's the worst-designed, slowest app that still makes a lot of money?
#103WordPress. 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)
For those that don't have to customize it, it 'just works' right? Also, their only major competitor was blogger at the time which, IIRC, was far less customizable and monetizable.
Re: Ask HN: What's the worst-designed, slowest app that still makes a lot of money?
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is probably the right answer. Between oldness, amount of money made, and general bad design, I think EHR systems take the cake.
Not to forget the myriad of different standards for storing and ex-/importing data...it's job security for the programmers, I guess
This was interesting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_health_record#Barri...
I forget, but I think there was some criticism that came out in a major paper about Epic Systems a couple years back. They all seem to be a mess (and salesperson's dream).
Re: Ask HN: What's the worst-designed, slowest app that still makes a lot of money?
#105Skype
To add to that, most business conferencing solutions in general are pretty bad: Skype for Business, WebEx, and Google Meet. Have seen a big pickup in Zoom which is decent.
Zoom isn't bad. I've seen companies using BlueJeans lately. HighFive (https://highfive.com/) was really great the one time I had a chance to set it up.
Re: Ask HN: What's the worst-designed, slowest app that still makes a lot of money?
#106WordPress. 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)
For those that don't have to customize it, it 'just works' right? Also, their only major competitor was blogger at the time which, IIRC, was far less customizable and monetizable.
It “just works” as long as you don’t install any themes or plugins. The moment you start adding stuff to it... oh boy...
That and the fact that most themes/plugins are coded by juniors, in the best case...
So, yeah, it “just works” as long as you don’t actually pretend to use it for something useful.
Re: Ask HN: What's the worst-designed, slowest app that still makes a lot of money?
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
For those that don't have to customize it, it 'just works' right? Also, their only major competitor was blogger at the time which, IIRC, was far less customizable and monetizable.
It “just works” as long as you don’t install any themes or plugins. The moment you start adding stuff to it... oh boy... That and the fact that most themes/plugins are coded by juniors, in the best case... So, yeah, it “just works” as long as you don’t actually pretend to use it for something useful.
Yep.
It's dominant in its space and definitely belongs on this list.
As someone that has created and destroyed so many blogs, it was easy to get going, choose a theme, and post. At one point, they may have gotten $10-20 from me so I could use my own domain. Not sure how they make their other money.