Having the best computer equipment and best software is one of the easiest strategies to get an edge as it allows you to stand on the shoulders of the giants who dedicate their lives to making their products better, faster and cheaper. Most of the large consultancies that I have worked with hold onto their equipment and software until it dies from natural causes so having new equipment and software will give you an instant advantage.However new software also usually comes with disadvantages as well. Most industry standard software is too complex to learn in a hurry, even if you are a geek. In many cases I actually had to un-install the software from my computer to prevent it from further confusing my life. The lesson I learned is that it is far more productive to master simple applications and then graduate to industrial standard applications. In fact, most of the professionals started learning industry standard software in the early days when it was less complex and some of them admit it would be hard to get started with today’s applications.
Open source software is one of the best places to get simpler applications. Most of the popular open source applications have risen out of a crowd of tens of thousands of open source and freeware programs. The popular applications are popular because they are good, often as good or better than their commercial rivals. Often you will find that you will never need to go to an industry standard application as the simpler tools suffice or you find that hand coding is just as fast when you have learned how to.
For very complex work, commercial applications often have an advantage in that they have every feature under the sun and they have been optimised for speed. The core applications in which you do the bulk of your work should probably be a leading commercial offering, however even then, download and trial all of its competitors. In most cases, I have found that industry standard software is far from the best software in terms of speed, simplicity and not crashing. It doesn’t hurt to try before you buy.