No. Tech moves slowly. I've been writing software for 28 years, professionally for 20 years and as a full-time entrepreneur for 10 years. Also spent the first 5

No. Tech moves slowly. I've been writing software for 28 years, professionally for 20 years and as a full-time entrepreneur for 10 years. Also spent the first 5 of those 10 years getting it wrong in terms of biz model. There are two things that are hurting you. 1. Corporate marketing: It's very important for every tech company to give the perception they're ahead of the curve, that they know magic stuff that you don't, that they're so smart it's not worth even trying to compete with them, that you better buy from them or work for them or you're completely screwed. You're believing this bullshit. 2. Geek obsession with shiny new things. Most of the new languages, platforms, storage engines and dev tools that come out are 5+ years away from being ready for production. Many of them are a solution looking for a problem. Many of them are proprietary or pseudo-open-source looking to create vendor lock-in or opportunities for monetization for a specific company. What most profitable companies use is old school to most developers, especially on the west coast and especially in the Valley. So just don't use new stuff until they're main stream. Read about them (in an article of 800 words or less), figure out what they're about and move on until they're ready for production - and even then decide whether you really have a need for the thing. You can sit down today and spend a few months writing a kick-ass web application using Linux, Apache with Nginx, PHP and MySQL and generate thousands of dollars a day in revenue or raise millions on the back of the product/service. Linux: Created 1991. PHP: Created 1994. MySQL: Created 1995. Apache: Created 1995. Nginx: Created 2002. There are few innovations that are really game changing. A few that come to mind: Nginx: Solved the C10K problem and lets you have over 100,000 concurrent connections to your web server using only a few megs of memory. Put it in front of Apache web server and divide your front-end hardware costs by 100. HTML5's web sockets: Now you CAN have push communication via HTTP. Previously long-polling was the only option. One thing I do agree with: Doing customer service if you're a developer does suck. However if you learn to love your customers and stay on top of it, it ain't so bad. And it's exactly what I'm about to spend my evening doing.