Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I bought and downloaded Ver. 3 on 9/13/12, the day it became available. It was terrible from the start with slow, unstable and erratic performance. The hardware and software was up to the task as this was on a new MacBook Pro Retina with Mountain Lion. I tried to contact support online and didn't receive a response for a week. This consisted of only telling me to delete the"plist" file. That resulted in no change, other than requiring even more time spent recalibrating the mic and retraining the Dragon to recreate the deleted file. I responded to support again after deleting the file as suggested, but didn't get an response in a reasonable period of time. During this period, I called support and described the strange behavior I was experiencing with "select" and "correct" commands as it was occurring on my screen. I believe that the technician hung up on me as he didn't have a solution. I called back and wound up on extensive hold. Finally, after more than an hour, I hung up. After trying to troubleshoot my system for several more hours I saw no option and contacted customer service for a refund, which was granted. It was a product they were apparently depending on the user to be a beta tester. I then installed Dragon Naturally Speaking Ver. 11 in a Parallels virtual machine running Windows 7 on this Mac and couldn't believe that these two dictation apps came from Nuance, the same company. The differences in the interface, performance, and speech recognition was astounding. It was as if competing companies had developed the two apps as they were that different. The Windows version is very sound and pleasant to work with; and this is before an update to the current Version 12. I'll stay on this path, even though I have to dictate a document, then copy and paste to the Mac app being used. This won't be practical for many purposes, such as routine emails, but the Mac app is totally impractical. Note that I've been using Dragon for Windows since version 3.5 Mobile (included a hand-held digital recorder) which was purchased in April 2000, more than 12 years ago. It was used extensively to dictate lengthy reports in MS Word. The Mac Version 3 was found to be virtually unusable, and that's really sad coming more than a decade later from this same company.