Well the small shoe is quite agile but its owner falls over more frequently. The large shoe is unwealdly and can end up too big to fit into tight corners or get round obstacles quickly. That is similar to my home pc and my corporate laptop. I’m free, within the bounds of legality, to put what I want on my own PC. This allows me the freedom to install IE7, Office 2007, Messenger 8, Sametime 7.5 when it is released as beta, in fact anything I choose. My corporate machine locks me down….I need to stick to corporate standards (athough I bend these where I can!). But still I’m constrained.
Steve has also grappled with the same issue and has invested heavily in his home setup. He has some interesting posts recently on virtualisation. This is one of those distruptive technologies which I hope corporates can adopt to allow staff who need to extensively test beta software to actually get it in the environment with minimal risk.