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

Speaking on the documentary General Magic, a procession of former employers talk about their inability to engage with the World Wide Web, chuckling or sighing at their own foolishness.

I understand why the men and women who lived through General Magic's rise and fall are so obsessed with missing the web, but I think that failure is a distraction from what really went wrong.

The web's huge today, and it's been huge for a generation, but in 1994, when the Magic Link was released, it was just a curiosity.

If the Magic Link had been configured to play nicely with the web, what difference would it have made?

Not enough difference to make anyone want to spend the equivalent of $3,000 on a Motorola Envoy.

Missing the web?

Embarrassing.

But not the reason General Magic failed.

So let's consider hypothesis two, which is that General Magic was always doomed because it was just too far ahead of its time.

In our Cautionary Tales episode, The False Dawn of the Electric Car, we met the Sinclair C5.

An attempt to imagine a sustainable electric vehicle that flopped so badly it became a national joke in the UK in the mid-1980s.

That was partly because Clive Sinclair made some bad choices in the way he designed and marketed his invention.

But it was also because electric cars need affordable, high-capacity batteries.

And they just didn't exist at the time.

Similarly for General Magic.

By the time Apple launched the iPhone in 2007, the price of memory had fallen a thousandfold since 1994.

And there was 500 times the processing power on a typical microprocessor.

There was Wi-Fi.

There were 3G phone networks.

The web had things on it.

Showing 241–260 of 411 · page 13 of 21