I’ve grabbed this post from my old Sun blog and put it here as well, as I’ve received a lot of positive comments on it and I don’t know how long the Sun blog will stay up.

One of the many things that separates the software world from the real world is sharing. Another is the speed of innovation. A new program with amazing new features that change your life can be distributed to the world within seconds, thanks to the internet. This model is very different from the “old” world where e.g. a carpenter can build a new house with “amazing new features” but he obviously can’t share his house with the rest of the world.
This very important difference requires a different perspective from people in the software world. But some (most?) people aren’t very good at distinguishing between the two worlds…

People in the industry tend to become very narrow-minded. As mentioned before, I really like to read comments on Digg and /. and fanboyism (yes, it’s a word) is at times very extreme, primarily visible when talks turn to Apple and to some extent also Google.

People will always have preferences, both in the real and the software world, and that is not a problem – it’s natural. What I would like to highlight in this entry is that times change really fast in the software world which means that it is hard to maintain preferences the way you do in real life. I understand that you buy the milk that you’re used to or the same brand car that you bought the last time, but you have to think differently when it comes to software.
Software changes much faster than anything in the real world. This means that you continuously have to reevaluate the software you use to maintain optimal productivity (or whatever the goal of your usage is). Hard to switch, you say? Then you’re not using open source programs and/or they’re not based on open standards.

When I do presentations, I won’t say that NetBeans is the best IDE. Anyone saying that is wrong because there are plenty of other fine IDEs out there which all have their strengths and weaknesses and one might be good for one task but not for the next.
So, in theory you should just try all of them whenever you start a new task. But there is one limiting factor: That little (or big) yellow price tag. And this is one of the areas where Sun differentiates itself from most of the competition: There is no price tag. There is no price tag on Solaris, you can just go download it for free. There is not price tag on Glassfish, you can just go download it. There is no price tag on NetBeans, you can just go download it!

It is a shame to be less productive than you can be. The software world changes faster than anything else. So be open minded and try new things! Especially when it’s free to keep an open mind.