(2022-08-29) Chin General Magic The Future Too Early

Cedric Chin case on General Magic - The Future, Too Early. In 1989, Apple employee Marc Porat conceptualised what was essentially an early version of the smartphone. The device, named Pocket Crystal, was a touchscreen mobile computer

Porat couldn’t get the resources he needed to develop Pocket Crystal internally, so Apple CEO John Sculley spun off this project as a separate company. And so in 1990, General Magic was born.

Many of the original team members who created the Macintosh signed up — including some legendary personalities such as Andy Hertzfeld, Joanna Hoffman, and Bill Atkinson.

In 1991, Tony Fadell joined General Magic as a diagnostics software engineer

To frame General Magic’s challenge properly, it is helpful to consider the state of technology at the time

they had to solve a large number of design and technical challenges.

General Magic’s early years were marked by a wild period of experimentation.

As software architect Darin Adler said “we decided to make everything. I mean, we were making it all.” For example, when they were prototyping the Pocket Crystal, none of the touch screens available were good enough. They were too noisy or came with too low a resolution. So General Magic’s engineers invented a new touchscreen

The next problem General Magic had to solve was manufacturing and distribution of their product.

they assembled an unwieldy alliance of companies to make and maintain their product. The General Magic Alliance

The alliance had an unintended side-effect: it locked them into developing a private network powered by ATT, just as the internet began to gather steam. At the time, there were multiple competing networks — with the Internet one option amongst many.

In public presentations, Porat railed against the emerging world wide web

One of General Magic’s tech support engineers, a soft-spoken man named Pierre Omidyar, started an auction service on his personal website. He asked multiple colleagues to check it out, and to help him spin out the service into its own company. All of them rejected him.

General Magic was busy with its own problems — it was, frankly, a mess. The entire company structure was an experiment: there were little-to-no top-down processes, no performance reviews, and few structured meetings.

General Magic’s lack of organisation led to multiple product launch delays. When Fadell joined in 1991, the plan was to ship a device in nine months

This went on for four years, until 1994. And even then, General Magic wanted to delay the launch further, but simply couldn’t. A year earlier in 1993, Apple had launched Apple Newton.... Andy Hertzfeld said, later: “They were our closest partner, who really gave us our life. And so when we found out they were trying to kill us, we felt completely betrayed.”

When General Magic finally shipped in 1994 — under the threat of Apple’s Newton — they hadn’t made the Pocket Crystal that Porat first dreamed of in 1989. Instead, they released something they called the Sony Magic Link. It weighed 1.5 lbs (0.68 kg) and was priced at US$800 (US$1560 in 2022 dollars) (Laptop weight (cost) at this time?)

But nobody bought it.

In the end only three to four thousand Magic Link devices were sold

From 1990 to mid-1996, the company lost more than $74 million dollars.

They would eventually shut down operations in 2002.