OK so I finally succumbed and got a Galaxy SIII. In the application to my procurement manager the reason I gave was that I have a new project with more travel so I need a better phone I can work on while I am out of the office. I had been thinking about a tablet but that‘d be just one more thing to carry round. And the battery on my old phone was on the way out. And …, well, I just wanted a really nice phone. I have always been jealous of my friends with iPhones – it’s a long time since one of them showed me the app that makes a picture of a beer glass empty as you tilt it but how could you not want a phone that does that?
The question then was which should I choose, wait for an iPhone 5 or get the big Galaxy? Apple or Android? Perhaps the defining question of our age. In the ‘60’s and 70’s it would have been the Beatles or the Rolling Stones, in the 90’s, Mac or PC? As always with the really big questions of life, the universe and everything there is a lot of debate but most of it boils down to ‘like/don’t like.’
I’ve always been a fan of pre-Android Auntie Google and it’s been fascinating to watch them steadily add a range of services and get them to work together. When I started this business I loaded up my contacts into my old Android phone and I got a diary and everything to work with my laptop using freeware. Bye-bye Outlook. Then, of course, I became a passionate defender of Android; open source, multi platform, non-restrictive and mostly free, against the evil expensive walled-garden of Apple. And laughed at the beer glass app.
Well, not really, but I do like the contrast between Apple and Google as they scrap to be the company with biggest market capitalisation in the known universe. Apple currently rules with their “we are geniuses; this is so cool you will queue to buy it at many times the cost of production” model, where the code and the hardware production are held very tight. Google has just overtaken Microsoft’s market cap to place second with its “You are nice people, we are nice people, so you can relax and let us sell your data” model with the handsets produced by anyone who wants. Which business model is best? Personally I think Google’s way is creepier but more sustainable in the long term. I suppose I feel that the trade-off of getting free stuff that works in exchange for being sent either eerily accurate or hilariously misplaced ads is better than selling your soul to the sleek gods of design.
Does it matter in the end? Both models work. Both companies have adopted strategies that make money for shareholders and deliver us an increasing range of services that we value and which actually look very much alike. They have taken very different paths and stuck to them (so far; we’ll see if Apple can hold on to the genius thing minus the Genius) to reach similar end points. Google hasn’t looked at Apple, suddenly thought ‘let’s do it their way’ and stopped all this open-source nonsense (although Samsung seems to have looked very closely at an iPhone.) Apple hasn’t decided to go all friendly and lovable and add a few more buttons.
And why would they? Why abandon your core strategy when you can build your business by integrating new services within it? Perhaps because you have no underlying belief in what you are doing.
Which is why I paused when reading the recently released National Science Challenges Cabinet Paper. New money in the science system is always welcome and I really like the idea of public engagement in picking the Challenges – particularly now the public engagement has been ramped up from what the Cabinet Paper seemed to envisage. But why are we are going to “review and simplify funding models for research and commercialisation?” They have been reviewed and simplified a lot lately. There is other concerning stuff in there as well. I especially enjoyed the proximity of the phrase “suggests a substantially greater role for MBIE in coordinating the science work programmes that it funds” to the “simplify” comment.
Yes, the Challenges should provide a great opportunity to coordinate and connect a lot of research that will lead to real solutions. However the underlying programmes are long term pieces of work. What they need is consistency of funding to continue developing a deep knowledge base, not short term shifts to address currently sexy issues. Adding the Challenges to an underlying stable funding system will allow the use of the research developed over many years to make a greater difference to New Zealand.
What bothers me is that efforts to ‘simplify’ the system around the Challenges have the potential to mean we forget about funding everything else. Researchers will have to spend a lot of time and waste a lot of effort refocusing their work to chase the money to ensure their long term survival – and for the country to retain their knowledge and skills. The research won’t be the better for it and when the next challenge comes along, what then? Where will the research you’d want to ‘coordinate and connect’ come from? I really hope that we will add the National Science Challenge funding stream to the base provided by the current system rather than rejig the whole thing and start again. If what you are trying to achieve is complex then a little complexity in the funding is inevitable.
And the Galaxy SIII? It’s great. I can write and store documents and access the internet like I can from my laptop and everything synchronises nicely. And, yes, it looks really pretty. The screen is lovely just to touch. I’m still looking for a beer glass app but I’ve loaded up lots of others and they all seem to work. The only drawback so far is that it uses a lot of battery power when you do all these exciting new things.
So I hope MBIE make good use of the extra million dollars heading their way in this era of public service funding caps. And then there is all that PGP money…maybe…
