I prefer reading a 250-350 word or shorter article opposed to 500+ words as it gets straight to the point
people get bored if they read an article that has a lot of words that not very deep. 250-450 words is enough for an article. Just put the important thing and don't put too much deep words.
You guys seriously aren't reading expert-written articles. An article over at SEOMoz is failed if it's less than 200 words IMO. You can't explain things in such a short amount of content, you need extra details added which makes that a decent article has at least 500 words in nice summed up paragraphs
Usually 250 is the very minimum when writing an article. You should shoot for at least 300 words and have it read very well like a person actually wrote it instead of having an article machine or spinner create the article. And google likes at least 300 words, so does ezine articles.
I'd consider that more of a blog post than an article. I can't say anything in less than 800 words 8*)