Tim Harford

speaker

411 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Sep 2026 last heard 11 Sep

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

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

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

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

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

Maybe General Magic would like to invest in it.

One colleague's response was pretty typical.

This is the dumbest idea I've ever heard.

You're going to get strangers to trust each other on the internet?

Lots of luck.

We're not interested.

Have fun.

Pierre was a very quiet guy with a very silly-seeming idea.

But the idea wasn't silly.

It was eBay.

And it made Pierre Omidyar a multi-billionaire.

Of course, General Magic knew about the World Wide Web, but they could easily come up with excuses to ignore it.

They were in partnership with the phone company AT&T, which was developing its own private network.

This was the place where you could surf to on your Magic Link and buy theatre tickets, for example.

General Magic's graphical interface was a rich, interactive multimedia environment, whereas the web in the mid-1990s was mostly just pages of text linking to other pages of text.

General Magic's boss, Mark Peratt, declared, "...the web is passive.

They could do without it."

The irony is painful.

Mark Peratt, the visionary who coined the phrase information economy, the man who told PBS viewers in 1980 that they were living in an information economy that would change their relationship to each other and change the very way they perceived reality.

This was the man who dismissed the World Wide Web.

Showing 221–240 of 411 · page 12 of 21