Khoi Vinh on what’s wrong with iTunes

Khoi Vinh calls iTunes “a convoluted mess”:

More than a textbook case in how not to design usable software though, iTunes has for me come to represent all the things that Apple is doing wrong, even as the company’s profits continue to snowball. On just one level, the application is an executional mess that speaks to the company’s worrying inattention to detail. iTunes is slow and bloated; it’s a terrible, poky, unreliable network client; it’s embedded into the operating system and yet works well with few other apps; its management of iOS devices (for those who don’t use iCloud) is painfully inelegant. And if all that weren’t enough, it just looks incredibly ugly.

I’ve begun to think of iTunes as Microsoft Word for music.

[Please, no arguments about Word. That’s my analogy. Feel free to substitute another application to make an analogy of your own.]