Tim Harford

speaker

636 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Sep 2026 last heard 6d ago

Tim Harford’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

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

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

Belatedly, general magic started to scramble.

Engineers built bunk beds in the office so they could work around the clock.

Everyone was exhausted.

It didn't make any difference.

The product was still late and still had too many coin flips and walking lemons and not enough streamlined, responsive, useful apps.

Mark Peratt left the company.

General Magic limped on for a few more years, then collapsed.

Mark Peratt's marriage collapsed too.

He might have felt that he had unlimited time and unlimited energy, but the truth was that he only had so much to give.

And instead of giving it to his wife and children, he gave it all to perfect strangers.

We all have limits in the end.

The question is when we face up to them.

People did learn lessons from what happened at General Magic.

One of the young magicians was Tony Fadell.

When General Magic had started up, he'd phone them every day, begging for a job, until finally they let him in.

When it fell apart, he was devastated.

But he learned.

Andy eventually moved to another tech company and paid close attention to two things that General Magic had neglected.

Number one, what's new and exciting and possible given current technology?

Number two, what deadline can we set ourselves to keep us on track?

Showing 581–600 of 636 · page 30 of 32