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.

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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

So if you have apparently infinite money and a compelling vision of the pocket crystal, what are you going to do?

Try to build the pocket crystal, of course.

And if the pocket crystal simply couldn't be built with the technology of the early 1990s, try to build it anyway.

You've got talent.

You've got time.

Why compromise?

But the trouble with that approach is that it meant General Magic's engineers never had to be disciplined about what they were trying to do.

With less money, what would General Magic have done?

They might have reasoned, we have good partners and great engineers, but we only have so much cash.

We need a product that will sell.

What can we make with today's technology that someone will want to buy?

Instead, they never even got as far as defining someone.

The general magicians would talk about their target market as being Joe Sixpack.

You know, the ordinary person, the man on the street.

Everyone, really.

And as Mark Peratt had explained back in the 1970s, eventually, everyone would have a portable communications device.

But not when it has a 200-page manual, is the size of a hardback book, and costs thousands of dollars.

Imagine that General Magic hadn't been trying to invent the future all at once and had instead decided to produce a useful tool for a clearly defined market.

Say, corporate executives who are often on the road.

Would the product have been different?

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