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Comment by Apocryphon | Hacker News Reader

Why are the most essential programs in life the ones that always have the most obscenely bloated updates?

The only reason iTunes seems to be essential is because there is almost no competition on OSX. Its a fairly horrible music player / media organizer compared to most Windows based software.

I only use Skype to video chat with my daughters and it could be easily swapped over to Google chat + Video.

I'm not talking about just iTunes and Skype, though. I can think of several consumer programs that have become more bloated with worse UIs over time- AIM, Ad-Aware, Windows Media Player, Firefox...

It seems rather inevitable.

Netscape was a classic too. I think Windows Explorer gets a nod as well.

What do you dislike about Firefox's UI? I could never go back from Firefox 4 to Firefox 2 or 3.

The windows ui got a bit worse(no menubar by default right)

The orange menu button. I find it distracting.

> Its a fairly horrible music player / media organizer compared to most Windows based software.

Y'know people like to say this, but I think it's simply untrue. MediaMonkey/Winamp/Songbird/Media Jukebox/FooBar all have the advange they're more flexible & have greater format support, but for simply listing and playing and managing your music, iTunes is far nicer.

All music managers are horrible to some extent, I am left wondering why.

Because they can get away with it... If there was better competition, (in an ideal world) the quality of the product would get better.

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