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Without wishing to unneccecarily trash anyone, Matt's stuff is rediculously popular, considering the quality of his products. I run servers containing many thousands of websites, and over the years I have been constantly amazed at the problems caused by his code. Thinking about it now, I wonder why I didn't submit a whole bunch of patches to him in the first place - maybe that would have helped things.

This seems to echo somthing that's true accross all western society -- the masses just accept whatever is rammed down their throat. Matt put a lot of effort into FAQs, nice packaging, a pretty website, and decent search engine submission. And he did all this at a time when there was little else available. I hope he's now worth a lot of money and drives a nice car.

Websites were still very much the domain of HTML monkeys who needed that extra little active add-on. They can't read the code, so they have no way to judge the quality of it. Why do people eat McDonalds or buy lousy stereos?

So, the question for me is this: How do we encourage the popularity of high quality software in a market where the buyer is simply not empowered to make the "right" descision? They are certainly not reading perlmonks...

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