Yesterday’s technology for work, today’s technology for everything else

It’s a Free Country, so why can’t I pick the technology I use in the office?

At the office, you’ve got a sluggish computer running aging software, and the email system routinely badgers you to delete messages after you blow through the storage limits set by your IT department. Searching your company’s internal Web site feels like being teleported back to the pre-Google era of irrelevant search results.

At home, though, you zip into the 21st century. You’ve got a slick, late-model computer and an email account with seemingly inexhaustible storage space. And while Web search engines don’t always figure out exactly what you’re looking for, they’re practically clairvoyant compared with your company intranet.

This is the double life many people lead: yesterday’s technology for work, today’s technology for everything else. The past decade has brought awesome innovations to the marketplace—Internet search, the iPhone, Twitter and so on—but consumers, not companies, embrace them first and with the most gusto.

So true! Even Universities are on the “party like it’s 1999″ bandwagon. University Laval’s Capsule seems straight out of a geocities user experience manual. Teluq (a campusless university), who should be a leader in using to internet as an education tool, is more up to date with A(H1N1) than communication technologies.