Tabulas told me it's Mr Josh Herman's birthday today. I have never met you in my life, but happy birthday.

. . .

Was reading some /., and this question came up: "Why is it that so many small or independent developers give us so much quality software, often without reward, and huge companies like AOL can only spit out this bloated garbage?"

The answer:

Because the small guy actually cares about the product, has passion around it, enjoys the work, and wants to put out something that makes him look good. He's also far more likely to "dogfood" the application, so it has to work for him before anyone else.

Huge companies like AOL (this is a generalization!) only care about the bottom line, and the passion & interest for the product isn't nearly as strong at the level of the developers. They aren't building something they believe in, they're building what they're paid to build. Add in "too many chiefs, not enough indians" (basically, every mid-level manager and marketdroid has to get their word in and impose their will) and the end result is bloated garbage.

Is this why the trend in innovative websites is:

1. Small development company (aka Pyra Labs, LiveJournal, LudiCorp) make kickass site
2. Bigger company swallows companies whole (Google swallows Pyra Labs, 6A ingests LJ and Yahoo! eats LudiCorp [sorry, was running out of adjectives]) instead of developing own application

Worth nothing that del.icio.us is another site that fits this trend; who will buy them out?!?!

Honestly, with the tools that are available to developers today (memory-managed scripting languages like PHP and ASP), developing large-scale applications is incredibly efficient.

Viva la small developers!