Tim Harford

speaker

636 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Sep 2026 last heard 4d 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.

Appearances

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

You'd list stuff that you had lying around that you didn't want anymore, and other people would see that stuff and bid for it.

Pierre called his website Auction Web.

He'd show it to his colleagues.

He asked them for help.

Maybe he could set up a company, spin it out from General Magic.

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.

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