"...no customer cares if your monkeywrench is the latest version or 5 years old, or even if it works." ...aaaand, if you have a crappy monkey wrench, you won't

"...no customer cares if your monkeywrench is the latest version or 5 years old, or even if it works." ...aaaand, if you have a crappy monkey wrench, you won't get the pipes tight enough and something will leak. I don't want to see my plumber tightening pipes with his hands because even I know that it's not going to work well. The customer just wants a working piece of software, yes. But great tools - OS, editor, language, development framework, design patterns, UI principles, etc - help you to fulfill that requirement. The user doesn't know about them, but indirectly, they do care. Example: our company had an internal app written in 100% custom PHP. It had taken a year to create. The developer left and a new one took over. He rewrote the whole thing in Rails in a week and quickly started making big improvements. (Yes, a lot of the time difference was due to work ethic and talent of the new programmer, but still, the tools were a factor.) Did the customer - his boss - care about the tool set? Heck yes, he did! Getting drastic productivity gains and many more iterations of development convinced him to care. He's now on board with Rails development and willing to send developers to RailsConf. He has seen that because results matter, tools matter.