Tim Harford

speaker

411 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Sep 2026 last heard 6d ago

Tim Harford’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.

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Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford · Talent, Time and Money: The Curse of General Magic · 11 Sep 2026 podcast

That's where the e-book library is.

There's also a store where you can buy apps.

They didn't call it an app store, but I'll say it again, a store where you can buy apps.

General Magic really was inventing the future.

So why did General Magic fail?

There was, I think, a deep and tragic flaw in the way General Magic operated.

Before we get to it, we need to describe the symptom.

General Magic, for all the money and talent and influence it had, made products that were late, expensive, and didn't deliver on those early promises.

The first device to appear running General Magic's revolutionary operating system was Sony's Magic Link in 1994.

Behind all those fancy skeuomorphic graphics, it was complicated to use with a 200-page manual.

It was about the size of a hardback book, with a grayscale monochrome touchscreen about the size of a postcard.

It ran on old-fashioned AA batteries, and it drained them mercilessly.

in a world before Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.

The device instead had an old-fashioned telephone jack.

To send a message, you needed to sit at your office desk and plug the device into a telephone cable.

Oh, and you had to do that to make calls, too.

It didn't even have a built-in cell phone.

It would be unfair to say that the Magic Link was a terrible product.

The graphics were charming, the sound effects pleasing, the touchscreen interface was ahead of its time.

But fundamentally, it was a lot of money.

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