Turnitin seems to have served a useful purpose in its early days—the early NCLB era—when it was simply a plagiarism-checker and when students were still required to submit their a hard copy of their assignments on good, old-fashioned paper. But since universities have generally shifted to allowing their students to submit only in electronic form, and using Tii for this purpose, Turnitin has simply not kept up at the technological level at all.
It is grindingly slow. It tends to be crashy (as in, you’re submitting a grade, then TurnitinFeedbackStudio crashes before it’s recorded on the sever). It’s copy-and-paste functionality acts like something from 1997. On the iPad, it does not seem to implement the iOS dictation functions and spelling-correct very well. The Quickmark system is slightly helpful but not really all that quick. The process of adding free form comments does not feel fluid at all. And oh yeah, it can take up to half a minute for the annotations that are already on a paper to appear onscreen. (And it’s not too hard to argue that all of this actually warps the quality of feedback that students receive.)
Moreover, all of these above functions could be performed using using other software tools with significantly more efficiency. But Turnitin uses the advantage of its market-capture monopoly to avoid developing its product for actual users.
The real problem, of course, is that most of its users are poor, or at least by definition underpaid (they are graduate students and teaching assistants, or paid markers). This means they need to work more hours to make enough money to live on. But the tool they must use to complete their job actually slows down the process of working. So, they can’t take on additional work, and thus, they remain poor and have a degraded quality of life. All because some company ended up with software mission-creep to the point that it had deployed a bad product everywhere that somehow everyone was still using.