The weird thing to me about all of this is that Palm could have hired three programmers for two months and developed a better piece of software than iTunes.

iTunes is one of those pieces of software, like Outlook, that people use and claim to like, even though it's a piece of crap, because it's what's been plopped in front of them, and it's the client for a system for which there are no other clients (Exchange Calendar/iTMS).