Anil Dash on judging tools

There’s a really good post (link) on Anil Dash’s weblog that goes quite along the lines of my “Ajax won’t cook you breakfast” post, which you should definitely read if you haven’t yet. Anil criticizes (and I quite agree) raving about products because of their underlying technologies just because they’re “hip”. He does this by talking about Blinksale (Techcrunch Profile), but in my opinion, it’s not about the product itself.

Abstracting from Blinksale (because this may not be their case, I’ve been too busy to keep up on stories on them), product developers are starting to promote tools based on what they’re built on and not what they effectively acomplish. This is just plain silly for several reasons. First, because Ajax (and you know everybody is getting it on their apps like it was sugar) isn’t the be-all-end-all of web technologies (definitely read my ajax post for the explanation why). Secondly, because I (and most people) don’t really care what it was built on if it does its work, and it does it well enough for me to use it. Heck, if you look at most web apps right now you won’t even know what they’re built on, but you know they work, right? Isn’t that a little more important than going around showing your technology-bling?

I really believe it is.