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

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

General Magic's boss, Mark Peratt, declared, "...the web is passive.

They could do without it."

The irony is painful.

Mark Peratt, the visionary who coined the phrase information economy, the man who told PBS viewers in 1980 that they were living in an information economy that would change their relationship to each other and change the very way they perceived reality.

This was the man who dismissed the World Wide Web.

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.

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