The arrival of iTunes 12.2 and Apple Music, welcomed by some, proved to be a nightmare for others. It wasn’t just about the interface, although the individual reviews for Apple’s music subscription service were somewhat mixed. The complaints were mostly about clutter, but I am more annoyed at the inconsistencies between how you handle suggested albums in For You in iTunes compared to Music for iOS. With the latter, you have a context menu option labeled, “I Don’t Like This Suggestion,” which doesn’t have a direct counterpart in iTunes.

Worse, it doesn’t seem to work, as suggestions that I specifically unliked still show up in For You after nearly two weeks of deliberately selecting, tapping, holding and selecting. Why foist artists I do not like on me? Might as well spend my valuable time on something more productive.

But that’s a feature, or the lack of a feature, not necessarily a bug. When it comes to bugs, some are pretty serious. One involved having DRM mistakenly attached to content from iTunes Match. So it prevents you from playing those songs on “unauthorized” gear.

Messy.

The release notes for Monday’s iTunes 12.2.1 maintenance update claim that Apple has fixed the problem and “Provides a way to correct a library problem affecting former iTunes Match subscribers.” All well and good, but it doesn’t exactly state how. That forces you to search Apple’s support sites for an explanation, such as it is.

The document I located provides guidance that could require a lengthy manual process. After applying the update, you control-click or right-click the songs incorrectly labeled as Apple Music, select Remove Download, and re-download them via the Make Available Offline option. You can, I suppose, select more than one track to replace at a time, but if you have hundreds or thousands of songs that were flagged with unwanted DRM as Apple Music, it could take hours to fix.

Why, then, wouldn’t Apple set up a process to rescan your entire library and just fix the problem at its source? Why force users, who did nothing wrong, to have to go through a manual removal/download procedure? Awkward? You bet? Remember, iTunes Match tracks are owned by the customer, not by Apple, and embedding DRM on those tracks was just plain wrong. Apple has no right to restrict access to the music you purchased or copied from other sources, such as a CD.

Even if the problem is fixed, there’s another issue, one even more serious. Some users have reported corrupted iCloud Music Library contents, ending up with bad metadata and artwork, duplicates, and even lost playlists and tracks. In other words, a mess that may force you to restore your library from a backup, or rebuild from scratch. Imagine if you’ve spent months or years building up a personal music library and you subscribed to Apple Music to widen your horizons. Suddenly everything falls apart, and you’re stuck with a borked music library.

To be fair to Apple, the iTunes 12.2.1 update may have been rushed out to at least tackle part of the problem. It may take far longer to get at the root cause and find a workable solution, one that doesn’t force you to manipulate tracks manually, restore your stuff from scratch, or suffer in silence.

It’s easy to criticize Apple for allowing this flawed update out the door, but if the number of corrupted databases or wrongly chosen iTunes Match tracks is small, it may have been one of those situations where internal testing simply failed to pick up evidence of the problem. Or if a problem was discovered, it wasn’t consistent enough to blame on a flaw in iTunes or iCloud. I wouldn’t presume to guess, and Apple will probably not explain what was discovered and why the initial fixes weren’t sufficient to overcome the problem.

I would hope there will be some way to rebuild the library from scratch, online and on your Mac or PC, so you don’t have to engage in manual labor to set things right. The company who packed vast stores of technology into the tiny Apple Watch can surely figure out a way to fix this problem without further fuss or muss. Even then, it may take a while to thoroughly vet such an update before it gets out in the wild. Apple has been stung before with buggy updates even though Microsoft has done worse.

To some of you, however, even a fixed iTunes won’t be sufficient to fix the problem. It’s more about some questionable choices that have made iTunes more and more irritating to use. That solution, however, would require a fairly thorough rethinking and redesign. I wouldn’t know whether Apple is sensitive to the criticism. For now, however, just fixing the iCloud Music Library and iTunes Match issues would be enough to get things rolling again.

The rest can come later, but not much later.

Last year, Apple announced that the first one million people who applied for the OS X public betas would get into the program, but it doesn’t seem as if those numbers were ever confirmed, or anyone was actually blocked from signing up. Regardless, iOS was eventually added to the mix, ahead of Apple’s decision to merge all developer programs into one.

The long and short of it is that anyone who is interested in getting iOS and OS X betas can sign up, download copies and install them. It’s sort of like the Windows Insider program, where, if you are still taking a breath, you can apply and be assured of getting the final version when it’s released.

But that doesn’t mean you should jump onboard with Apple’s forthcoming operating systems. Remember that they are, in their own ways, supremely buggy, and performance may not quite what you expect, or what Apple has promised. Take OS X El Capitan and Apple’s claim that apps will launch up to 40% faster, and that you’ll be able to switch from one to another twice as fast. Apple says “up to,” and don’t expect to be able to gauge final performance until the release version is installed.

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So iTunes hasn’t exactly received the love in recent years. Some say it’s bloated, although technically that’s not quite true. Others are just overwhelmed by all the features that are regularly added, without taking steps to simplify the interface so the power of the app is at your beck and call.

Others fret over stability and reliability issues, and reports that music databases may be borked with iTunes 12.2 and Apple Music only make matters worse.

Now my history with iTunes goes back to its origins as SoundJam and later SoundJam MP Plus from a now-defunct publisher known as Casady & Greene. In 2000, Apple made the smart decision to buy the product, and bring along its developers, including Jeffrey Robbin, now a VP of consumer applications at Apple.

In addition to being lead developer of iTunes, Robbin is credited with helping to create the software for the iPod, and was, several years ago, reported to be a part of the development project to create an Apple TV set. Of course, that project appears to have been discontinued, but it’s notable how Apple has put Robbin in charge of significant projects. I’ve known him for years, and he’s a real talented guy and deserving of his success.

But something’s gone real wrong with iTunes, and it’s in need of serious repair, or Apple needs to start over and rethink the app. Before I go on, don’t assume that starting over is anything new with Apple. Ask users of Final Cut Pro, for example. Although the new and far cheaper version, Final Cut Pro X, got a whole lot better over time, some loyal users chafed at the changed interface and lost features, and went elsewhere. Still, Apple is not shy about changing thingsy, and it’s high time that iTunes go under the knife.

The latest version, 12.2, was released to introduce Apple Music. It’s otherwise substantially the same as the previous cluttered version, only it’s more cluttered. It only adds new layers of inconsistency and unpredictable behavior to an app that was already breaking at the seams.

A major change of version 12 was the use of a context-sensitive navigation bar that totally confounds muscle memory. So when you move from Music to Podcasts or to Movies, the options and the width of the nav bar labels changes. This may make sense from a logical point of view, but it means that you have to stop and think before you click. Apple Music merely adds extra labels for the Music section. There’s no Apple Music icon, since the feature integrates with existing music features.

All right, that’s part of it, and I suppose most of you have gotten used to the poor implementation of this feature. There’s more, however. With Apple Music, context menus usually don’t work, and the ellipses that are usually placed next to the titles of albums and tracks don’t deliver consistent context results. Select an album in the For You page and the ellipse will only allow you to share the album. When you click on the album to open its playlist, you have additional options to share an album, but none to tell Apple Music you want that thing off your list post haste.

To make matters worse — and more confusing — if you tap and hold an album title in the For You list in Music for iOS 8.4 (and now the 9.0 beta), you not only have extra choices, but one entitled “I Don’t Like This Suggestion.” Why isn’t that readily available with iTunes? Tell us Mr. Robbin!

I realize that iTunes is very much a browser, meaning that the content you access can be instantly altered. I suppose that adding more context options is something that could be done on-the-fly without updating the app, and maybe it’ll be fleshed out over time as the service is refined.

For now, however, the interface and the layout are poorly designed, as if it was perhaps thrown together to meet a deadline with the hope it’ll be fixed later. Kirk McElhearn, Macworld’s “iTunes Guy,” and my go-to expert on such matters, suggests that Apple’s marketing people are being given too much power to drive the look and feel of iTunes. It’s more about turning visitors into paying customers, but it doesn’t even succeed on that level. If they hope you’ll buy a track you’re enjoying in Apple Music, the process is definitely not easy.

Or perhaps Apple really does believe that we are all destined to rent music, and this is only guiding you into that direction. Remember, when you rent music, you own nothing other than the tracks you’ve previously purchased. Anything you’ve downloaded from Apple Music stops playing when you stop paying. If you decide one month you have other priorities, and you’ve spent days fine-tuning your custom playlists, will Apple allow you to suspend your membership for a while, and allow you to pick up where you left off a month or two later? Just asking.

The reason I suggest Apple should kill iTunes and try over is that the app has moved in the wrong direction. It doesn’t mean it should be split up into separate media apps, as is done in iOS. Having a single place to get play and acquire content on a Mac or PC is probably the more efficient idea. But that shouldn’t keep Apple from starting over and devising a better way.

It’s not that there is better competition out there, particularly if you are accustomed to the Apple ecosystem. But how long will Apple allow this messy situation to continue before taking action?

Before I discuss Microsoft, let’s look at Google. Once upon a time, Google tried to build smartphones, and failed. In 2011, the search giant announced it was buying Motorola Mobility, a maker of mobile handsets, set-top boxes and other gear, for $12.5 billion. The purchase was finalized in 2012.

But Motorola handsets had been on the decline for years, and the division was spilling red ink. Google bought a loser, and the search giant didn’t have a strategy to improve things. A little more than two years later, failing to stem the red ink and sliding sales, Google had a fire sale and handed over the losing division to Lenovo for $2.91 billion. It was a waste for all concerned.

In the waning days of Steve Ballmer’s reign as CEO of Microsoft, he approved the purchase of Nokia’s handset division for $7.6 billion. The plan was to give Microsoft a hardware division with which to enhance the Windows Phone mobile platform, which was going nowhere fast. Of course, it came from the same executive who believed that Windows 8 would succeed, even though its interface was based on mobile gear that failed.

Well, Steve Ballmer is gone, and Satya Nadella is here, and he has been busy reorganizing Microsoft to embrace cloud services and software. Windows 10 throws out the worst excesses of Windows 8 and restores a semblance of the tried and true capabilities of the operating system that dominates the planet. There is a real Start menu again, and other features that enhance app and window management. If there’s a downside, it’s Microsoft’s belief that Windows 10 can successfully span all devices with support for touch-based screens, including smartphones.

Meantime, sales of Microsoft’s Nokia handsets haven’t exactly caught fire, despite favorable reviews for design and performance. Last year, Nadella fired 18,000 employees, of which an estimated 12,500 consisted of professional and factory workers that reportedly came from Nokia. This week, the company announced another restructuring, involving yet another 7,800 layoffs, again heavily focused on Nokia workers.

Indeed, one report indicates that the layoffs heavily impact Finland, where a high percentage of the Nokia workers reside. One report has it that 66% of Microsoft’s staff in that country would soon be out of jobs. In addition, Microsoft is taking a $7.6 billion writedown, equivalent to the original acquisition. It doesn’t undo it completely, since mobile handsets will still supposedly be built, but it’s questionable how long that’ll continue.

Now I wouldn’t suggest that the combination of the Windows 8 debacle and the failed Nokia acquisition were among the reasons why Ballmer ultimately stepped down, but it makes sense. It does appear that Nadella is working hard to restore the company’s reputation, and embrace a mobile-oriented future where Microsoft software and services are readily available on other platforms. The best mobile version of Office is on the iPad, and there is also an iPhone version. Mac users can get access to an Office 2016 beta that brings the office suite more in line with the Windows version, and fixes many of the bugs that afflicted previous versions.

A version of Office is also available on the Android platform, and it’s reportedly pretty decent, so clearly Microsoft isn’t kidding about spreading the joy. So even if fewer people care about buying Windows PCs, having Microsoft products available on the most popular mobile platforms, plus a greatly improved Mac version, will surely help the company’s bottom line. Of course that assumes that a large number of people downloading the apps will pay for Office 365 subscriptions, and it’s actually quite a decent deal.

My personal experiences with the Windows 10 betas has been extremely positive. I could barely use Windows 8, and always rushed from the tiled interface to the desktop, such as it was. Even Windows 8.1, which attempted to fix some of the worst ills of its predecessor, wasn’t altogether better. It certainly showed in the slow adoption rate.

Windows 10 is what Windows 8 should have been, a more natural descendant of Windows 7. While I’m not at all interested in a personal computer with a touchscreen, at least the operating system works well on a traditional desktop computer. You can use a mouse and keyboard and not be confronted with ill-thought features, such as the Charms settings screens, which only worked efficiently on touch-based systems.

This doesn’t mean everything in Windows 10 is just great. While the Cortana digital assistant may make sense on a personal mobile device, a large portion of the Windows user base resides in the business world. I can hardly see people speaking commands in their individual booths to get their PCs to do something, although I can see it possibly working in a home environment. Maybe that explains why Apple continues to resist calls to bring Siri to OS X. Apple has crafted some iOS influences into OS X, but the operating systems are clearly meant to be used on different machines, in different ways.

So when Apple speaks of the foolishness of merging a refrigerator with a toaster oven, it just makes sense.

Meantime, I feel bad for the thousands of people at Microsoft who will find themselves on the unemployment lines because of the bad decisions of its management.