Saw a tweet recently that summed it up nicely: "@anildash: Seems like Skype and iTunes are battling it out for the RealPlayer Memorial Award for Most Annoying Desktop Client App."
If you remember RealPlayer, know Skype for Windows, know iTunes for Windows, you'll know exactly what I mean.
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.
> 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.
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...
If you remember RealPlayer, know Skype for Windows, know iTunes for Windows, you'll know exactly what I mean.