Albert Wenger has a post on choosing technologies for new startups. There are a couple of data points he touches on, the primary one being risk:
If you are already taking market or behavioral risk you shouldn’t also take technology risk (if you can help it). But in the case of early Google people were already searching or Twilio sending and receiving calls/texts and the companies innovation instead was a breakthrough way of doing that which requires taking technology risk to deliver that breakthrough.
I think the risk model that Albert describes is pretty good. Just be careful to avoid comparing solutions used by others who have a completely different problem set than yours.