Better?

By what yardstick do we measure the all-new, sparkly thing? Why is it better than what went before?

I realise that this generic question means little without some context, so this is what specifically triggered it for me: .Net vs Java. If you don't know what these are, well it doesn't really matter but they are two immensely similar software technologies - I mean IMMENSELY similar. In my experience technical folks wrangle with the perennial question: which is better? The correct answer is of course 'it depends'.

The real issue is how do you define your yardstick? And this is the generic problem with asking the question without context. In fact, even having supplied some context (as above) the question is still unanswerable!