I started playing around with Google’s programming language called Go yesterday. There’s a tour of the language found here. Clearly, Go has been designed by a group of incredibly smart people and makes a series of terrific design decisions that enable a tremendous amount of flexibility and performance while reducing the amount of code an engineer has to write.

But after spending about 90 minutes running through the tutorial, I decided to throw in the towel.

It’s easy to become accustomed to a particular way of doing things. I’m familiar with the Ruby community, the libraries, the development environment and some the intricacies of the language. So it’s difficult to change all of that in the pursuit of some yet unknown gains.

Potential customers perform this calculus when evaluating technologies every day. Do I continue to use the technologies with which I’m most familiar? Or is the benefit of a new technology, net of its adoption costs, worth the learning curve?

Each sales pitch is an effort to convince the potential customer to change their behavior. Changing behavior isn’t an easy thing to do. It all starts with motivation triggered by a comparison between what I am doing and what I ought to be doing. To win customers, maximize that difference - or at least the perception of that difference.