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 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 2.

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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.

About $1,600 in today's money for not a lot of functionality.

The only people who bought it were the friends and family of general magicians.

Sony sold 3,000 units in the first six months.

Years later, Apple would sell about 300,000 iPhones on the first day.

The next year, 1995, another Alliance member, Motorola, released a better General Magic product.

The Envoy did have wireless communication.

Unfortunately, it was also almost twice the price of the Magic Link.

With flagship products like that, it's no surprise that General Magic started to struggle.

But then, why was the product so underwhelming?

There are a few explanations, so let's explore them.

I think the truth is surprising.

General Magic were so focused on building their new cloud network that they failed to adapt to the rise of the World Wide Web.

One of General Magic's developers remembers, we had an intern who's like, hey everybody, it's all about the web, you guys are totally missing it.

There was a tech support engineer at General Magic called Pierre, who'd set up a web page as a side hustle.

It was a sort of online garage sale.

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