>The company employs 14,500 people

There's the problem. I mean, Sage, right? Payroll, ledger, accounts payable, that sort of stuff?

Can anyone explain to me why it takes 14,500 people to manage a software product that could be entirely managed, by, say 4 or five coders in someone's shed?

WTF?

Is it me?

They're all support people. The product itself sucks, and is extraordinarily confusing. It takes months to learn the idiosynchracies, such as why you can't select a past pay slip from within the normal payslip report screen, instead you have to navigate somewhere entirely non-intuitive (I can't even remember it now without my cheat-sheet in front of me) . The upgrades routinely don't work, but fail silently. Basic usage requires administrative permission. AND the basic version doesn't run under WINE, and the 'native linux' version is WAY TOO EXPENSIVE ! I can't understand how they stay in business personally.

A big thumbs down to Sage

But the rest are no better, I should know I make a living fixing, supporting and modifying the competition.

Fair enough. Last time I read The Register in that case.

Please can you facilitate in the removal of my account / login details, or send me the details of how to do so via the email address that I have registered.

Unlike Carol Thatcher, I would like to offer an unreserved apology for any offence caused. I was careful to add another word between "Welsh" and "c*nt", but I fear you're right - the word Welsh still came across as pejorative, even though it was certainly not meant as such.

I do think it was a bit of a leap of imagination to compare Welsh with the P word or the N word, but given (upon re-reading) my poor gramatical construction I can see how this leap was easily made, and you are quite right that I would not have replaced the word Welsh with P... or N... (because those words are almost always offensive and I am vehemently anti-racist) or even Asian/Pakistani or black if they had belonged to those ethnic groups.

Right, enough apologising (it seems somewhat narcisitic)...he was the total c*nt, entirely irrespective of ethnicity, and I never got an apology from him.

Paris - because she's more careful about what she inserts.

...the company whose software can simultaneously bring a strong man and a strong computer to their knees. We made the mistake of buying a few seats of Act! - it added minutes to boot times, was horrifically complicated, and so difficult to use that we ended up switching to a roll-our-own database in a hosted wiki.

Granted, we're a tiny company and in a low-volume business, so maybe if you have 14,400 employees it's different. But that still doesn't explain why the software was such an unholy resource hog.

@"welsh"

Excellent scrap - thanks. We could play a game deciding what words one could/could not substitute for "welsh" in the comment. Personally, were I a Taff (some of my best friends are Welsh), I would strongly object to the lower-case "w". Apart from the you-will-fry-in-hell N- and P- words, you would not get away with "Jewish" or "dyke" or "Paddy" but "Christian", "British/Brit" and "French/Frog" would (probably) pass unnoticed. Words are weird.

And he probably doesn't mean it about the toys.

Sage products suck, whether managed by someone who is Welsh, Jewish, American, British, blah, blah, blah. A large pad of paper would be a better option.