This is utterly unacceptable in today's world. Spending money for a piece of software implies that you are getting something of utmost quality. The $300 USD that is forked over for Microsoft Office 2000 Professional, for example, ought to mean that it's worth $300 USD worth of someone's labour. In so being, it implies that this person (or company) has given their seal of approval which states that the software is of high quality and extreme effectiveness.
Unfortunately, the $300 USD that is spent on this piece of software is exchange-value only. You are not getting effectiveness, and efficiency. You are getting what the company thinks you will most likely pay for, nothing more than bells and whistles. You are paying for the number of features in the software package, features which, for the average user, remains untouched; you are paying for the affable ``paper clip'' (called Clippit) to come down and tell you what you can and cannot do. This, again, for the average user, supplies little or no useful information. If you pay $300 USD for a piece of software, at the very least, it ought do what it purports without a hitch. This, as any computer user will surely tell you, is rarely the case.
Drawing a simple analogy between the automobile industry and the computing industry may help to demonstrate my point. Consider buying a new car; after only a month, the car begins to stall every so often. You must restart the car in order to continue driving. Using the above arguments applied to a car, we have: ``cars are bound to have bugs and we should just deal with it,'' and ``The car has helped me in so many ways. This is just a price we pay.'' The absurdity in the argument is quite clear now. It's unacceptable for automobiles, why then should we accept it for computers?