One of the more annoying pieces of crapware I have to remove from the manufacturer's Windows preloads is Norton Antivirus. That's not because I hate it on principle - that is because I hate it based on my own usage experience. I (have to) use Windows for maybe one hour every couple of months or so. Even with that limited usage pattern I managed to develop a deep resentment to this worthless antivirus "solution" - for the way it immediately hogged all my available bandwidth on bootup to download enormous updates, for the way it didn't let me cancel that, for the way it stopped my work until the updates were installed, and for the way it required a reboot or two just before continuing. Ultimately, for the way it used to make "boot into Windows" a 30 minute affair before the damn thing got out of my way.

I thought I was alone wondering in amazement how people can charge money for it, until I read somebody else's perfect description of how I feel about it:

If ever a class of software deserved to be cast into the lower reaches of Hell and run on Satan's own desktop, it is this. Performance- sapping, space-hogging, noisy, irritating and prone to inducing just as many problems as they purport to solve, these horrible, ineffective, expensive lumps of digital thuggery keep entire platoons of support engineers in business and home users in tears.

That's part of a good article about how software should not work. Actually, the software itself is mostly fine, it is the surrounding packaging and integration into the operating system that sucks by being invasive, obnoxious and/or just plain annoying. In the world of Linux distributions and free software we have been spared the whole mess created by having every single application handle its own install, update/upgrade, dependencies and uninstall. Can you imagine the horror?