Tim Harford
speaker
636 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2026
last heard 3d ago
Tim Harford’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 2.
Appearances
Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford · Talent, Time and Money: The Curse of General Magic · 11 Sep 2026
podcast
Click on a manila folder to see your files, or a floppy disk to save your work.
That idea existed, but General Magic took it in new directions.
Click on the phone to make a call, on the inbox to check messages, or the calendar, the notepad, the Rolodex.
You get the idea.
Click on the door icon to go out on the virtual street.
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.
Showing 401–420 of 636 · page 21 of 32
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