7 ms·

Lessons from the failure of General Magic

130 points by adrian_mrd 8y ago

CalChris 8y ago
The article misses General Magic's most successful alum, Pierre Omidyar, who founded EBay while working at GM.
- chaostheory 8y ago
  Unless I missed it, they may have forgotten Andy Rubin as well. It's interesting how both Android and iPhone has connections to General Magic.
  - contingencies 8y ago
    It wouldn't surprise me if there is a tendency for an inner gestation period whereby fundamental ideas prosper from exposure to additional experience before maturing. Perhaps largely subconsciously.
devel0per_1 8y ago
I like embrace criticism part. It's so real. Sometimes while making a screen's layout I don't recognize bad decisions my colleagues see with first sight. It's amazing lol
- SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
  That's why teamwork is so important in every step of the development process, every step needs a review. If someone is such a rockstar they don't to have their items reviewed, all the review will do is show their rockstarness to someone else.
  - maxxxxx 8y ago
    Just make sure the reviewers are very good. I see a lot of team reviews by mediocre people that kill any kind of creativity.
aphextron 8y ago
Where do people still care about pushing the boundary, exploring new paradigms, and building shit? I'm so sick of hearing about this mythical "silicon valley of yore" where there was community, and fellowship, and a desire to improve humanity. I came here looking for that and all I see is rent-seeking mega corps bent on scaling their surveillance platforms. Is that dream still alive somewhere?
- maxxxxx 8y ago
  Totally agree. General magic tried to do something really innovative and failed. I think they deserve a lot of respect for trying something hard.
  - jackhack 8y ago
    There used to be plenty of room for innovation. General Magic made a PDA to compete with the Apple Newton Messagepad (the first "Personal Digital Assistant"). The Newton had a lovely pen-based user interface, and with the second revision, a handwriting recognition engine that worked perfectly. But sadly the early version failed to meet expectations (google "Beat Up Martin!") and Steve Jobs killed the project when he came back to Apple. So both the General Magic and the Newton Messagepad sadly lost out to the inferior-in-nearly-aspect Palm. (curiously, Palm got its start writing an alternative alphabet interpreter for the Newton. So if not for Newton, Palm would have never been born, and would not have defeated Apple.)
    - walrus01 8y ago
      The Newton also failed because it had a much shorter battery life than the Palm devices and was a great deal larger. And was a lot more expensive. Palm devices shipped out of the box with a docking station and ability to sync calendar/data with almost any Windows 98 or NT4/2000 PC.
      - jandrese 8y ago
        Also, Graffiti was fast once you got it down. Newton's handwriting recognition, even when it wasn't a total disaster, was kind of laborious. But mostly it was the price tag. Palm Pilots really did almost everything a Newton could do at half the price or less. The Outlook sync feature made sure they had a place in business as well.
fmajid 8y ago
I worked for France Télécom on their General Magic project, circa 1996. My job was to work on the payment and e-commerce aspects of the platform, and I came to the conclusion it was bound to fail because it lacked any provisions for transactional integrity, and asked to be transferred to another project. The Magic Cap UI, while cute, was hampered by the limitations of hardware back then, but the backend was the real killer. Their distributed-agent technology was half-baked, and despite AT&T Bell Labs's heroic efforts to make it work (including building an entire language, High Telescript, to make it usable), it failed anyway.
adrian_mrd 8y ago
My favourite quote from the piece: “If you have a bunch of self-motivated and smart people and you put them together they’ll produce something incredible. But you can’t minimize the importance of management. It’s a dirty word. It’s prosaic. It’s not vision. It’s not dream. It’s not technological excellence. But unfortunately, it makes all the difference.” - Joanna Hoffman, Head of marketing at General Magic Good management in technology environments is akin to tracks for a train/monorail. Boring: yes, but they provide the 'connective tissue', the velocity and the direction for everyone in the organisation to leverage, the support infrastructure for everyone else to produce great 'stuff' (products, services, outcomes, whatever). They should also build upon years of experience and/or brilliant thinking - which is what tracks do! Great tech management teams also help (all) staff understand why the tracks are there to begin with: to solve problems for users (relevant to the Andy Hertzfeld 'put the user first' and the Tony Fadell 'understand your audience' quotes). And yeah, reframing rejections and criticisms (the Marc Porat quote) is great advise for any entrepreneur.
ecolonsmak 8y ago
I'm planning a road bike tour of old silicon valley offices for next saturday, does anybody know where in Mountain View the offices of General Magic were located?
- gdubs 8y ago
  Looks like Mary Avenue in Sunnyvale. Just keep your wits about you — Sunnyvale isn’t the greatest town for biking. https://www.bloomberg.com/research/stocks/private/snapshot.asp?privcapId=124408 https://www.bloomberg.com/research/stocks/private/snapshot.a...
  - ecolonsmak 8y ago
    Thanks!
    - gdubs 8y ago
      No prob. Not sure the safest way to get there, but I'd probably start by taking Stevens Creek Bike Trail to Evelyn ave and then maybe heading up Mary (which is a pretty busy street, so maybe there's a better way.) Strava might be a good app to check.
  - masonic 8y ago
    I remember that building! I used to pass it all the time going to the then Sunnyvale main post office at the corner of Mary and Maude (now, shockingly, an Apple building).
Upvoter33 8y ago
Hagiography, meet Silicon Valley. "Would Android exist without General Magic? Absolutely not!" An overstatement which perfectly summarizes this film.
chx 8y ago
> and email addresses. All of these things were trying to make technology more accessible to people Uh nope. Nothing like that happened. SNDMSG allowed sending messages between users on the same computer. Then Ray Tomlinson added his file transfer code to SNDMSG and needed a symbol to separate user names from the host names, and he picked the @ Nowhere in there did anyone invent anything to make email addresses more accessible to people. The only reason there were host names and not just numbers on the right hand side was because ARPAnet really has grown and just a few months before Tomlinson's invention names were added https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc226 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc226 (20 hosts! really, big network) but this, again, predates email addresses. Another very early example of email in 1970 was integrated into the NLS (short for Online System) at the SRI ARC https://www.dougengelbart.org/pubs/papers/scanned-original/1986-augment-101931-Workstation-History-and-the-Augmented-Knowledge-Workshop.pdf https://www.dougengelbart.org/pubs/papers/scanned-original/1... but this used usernames and not addresses "mail distribution was addressed by peoples Idents with no need to know or specify which host they used".
- jibal 8y ago
  "Nowhere in there did anyone invent anything to make email addresses more accessible to people." That's not what it says ... it says trying to make technology more accessible to people. user@hostname email addresses, as opposed to the old UUCP bang paths, does indeed make technology more available to people. (FWIW, I worked on the ARPANET at UCLA and was there when the IMP arrived in 1969, so I do know a little something about this topic.)
  - chx 8y ago
    Perhaps what the article tried to say then it's the Domain Naming System which tried to make technology more accessible to people.
Reimersholme 8y ago
Wow, this title would make a perfect fantasy book title.

130 points by adrian_mrd 8y ago

CalChris 8y ago

The article misses General Magic's most successful alum, Pierre Omidyar, who founded EBay while working at GM.

chaostheory 8y ago
Unless I missed it, they may have forgotten Andy Rubin as well. It's interesting how both Android and iPhone has connections to General Magic.
- contingencies 8y ago
  It wouldn't surprise me if there is a tendency for an inner gestation period whereby fundamental ideas prosper from exposure to additional experience before maturing. Perhaps largely subconsciously.

devel0per_1 8y ago

I like embrace criticism part. It's so real. Sometimes while making a screen's layout I don't recognize bad decisions my colleagues see with first sight. It's amazing lol

SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
That's why teamwork is so important in every step of the development process, every step needs a review. If someone is such a rockstar they don't to have their items reviewed, all the review will do is show their rockstarness to someone else.
- maxxxxx 8y ago
  Just make sure the reviewers are very good. I see a lot of team reviews by mediocre people that kill any kind of creativity.

aphextron 8y ago

Where do people still care about pushing the boundary, exploring new paradigms, and building shit? I'm so sick of hearing about this mythical "silicon valley of yore" where there was community, and fellowship, and a desire to improve humanity. I came here looking for that and all I see is rent-seeking mega corps bent on scaling their surveillance platforms. Is that dream still alive somewhere?

maxxxxx 8y ago
Totally agree. General magic tried to do something really innovative and failed. I think they deserve a lot of respect for trying something hard.
- jackhack 8y ago
  There used to be plenty of room for innovation. General Magic made a PDA to compete with the Apple Newton Messagepad (the first "Personal Digital Assistant"). The Newton had a lovely pen-based user interface, and with the second revision, a handwriting recognition engine that worked perfectly. But sadly the early version failed to meet expectations (google "Beat Up Martin!") and Steve Jobs killed the project when he came back to Apple. So both the General Magic and the Newton Messagepad sadly lost out to the inferior-in-nearly-aspect Palm. (curiously, Palm got its start writing an alternative alphabet interpreter for the Newton. So if not for Newton, Palm would have never been born, and would not have defeated Apple.)
  - walrus01 8y ago
    The Newton also failed because it had a much shorter battery life than the Palm devices and was a great deal larger. And was a lot more expensive. Palm devices shipped out of the box with a docking station and ability to sync calendar/data with almost any Windows 98 or NT4/2000 PC.
    - jandrese 8y ago
      Also, Graffiti was fast once you got it down. Newton's handwriting recognition, even when it wasn't a total disaster, was kind of laborious. But mostly it was the price tag. Palm Pilots really did almost everything a Newton could do at half the price or less. The Outlook sync feature made sure they had a place in business as well.

fmajid 8y ago

I worked for France Télécom on their General Magic project, circa 1996. My job was to work on the payment and e-commerce aspects of the platform, and I came to the conclusion it was bound to fail because it lacked any provisions for transactional integrity, and asked to be transferred to another project. The Magic Cap UI, while cute, was hampered by the limitations of hardware back then, but the backend was the real killer. Their distributed-agent technology was half-baked, and despite AT&T Bell Labs's heroic efforts to make it work (including building an entire language, High Telescript, to make it usable), it failed anyway.

adrian_mrd 8y ago

My favourite quote from the piece: “If you have a bunch of self-motivated and smart people and you put them together they’ll produce something incredible. But you can’t minimize the importance of management. It’s a dirty word. It’s prosaic. It’s not vision. It’s not dream. It’s not technological excellence. But unfortunately, it makes all the difference.” - Joanna Hoffman, Head of marketing at General Magic Good management in technology environments is akin to tracks for a train/monorail. Boring: yes, but they provide the 'connective tissue', the velocity and the direction for everyone in the organisation to leverage, the support infrastructure for everyone else to produce great 'stuff' (products, services, outcomes, whatever). They should also build upon years of experience and/or brilliant thinking - which is what tracks do! Great tech management teams also help (all) staff understand why the tracks are there to begin with: to solve problems for users (relevant to the Andy Hertzfeld 'put the user first' and the Tony Fadell 'understand your audience' quotes). And yeah, reframing rejections and criticisms (the Marc Porat quote) is great advise for any entrepreneur.

ecolonsmak 8y ago

I'm planning a road bike tour of old silicon valley offices for next saturday, does anybody know where in Mountain View the offices of General Magic were located?

gdubs 8y ago
Looks like Mary Avenue in Sunnyvale. Just keep your wits about you — Sunnyvale isn’t the greatest town for biking. https://www.bloomberg.com/research/stocks/private/snapshot.asp?privcapId=124408 https://www.bloomberg.com/research/stocks/private/snapshot.a...
- ecolonsmak 8y ago
  Thanks!
  - gdubs 8y ago
    No prob. Not sure the safest way to get there, but I'd probably start by taking Stevens Creek Bike Trail to Evelyn ave and then maybe heading up Mary (which is a pretty busy street, so maybe there's a better way.) Strava might be a good app to check.
- masonic 8y ago
  I remember that building! I used to pass it all the time going to the then Sunnyvale main post office at the corner of Mary and Maude (now, shockingly, an Apple building).

Upvoter33 8y ago

Hagiography, meet Silicon Valley. "Would Android exist without General Magic? Absolutely not!" An overstatement which perfectly summarizes this film.

chx 8y ago

> and email addresses. All of these things were trying to make technology more accessible to people Uh nope. Nothing like that happened. SNDMSG allowed sending messages between users on the same computer. Then Ray Tomlinson added his file transfer code to SNDMSG and needed a symbol to separate user names from the host names, and he picked the @ Nowhere in there did anyone invent anything to make email addresses more accessible to people. The only reason there were host names and not just numbers on the right hand side was because ARPAnet really has grown and just a few months before Tomlinson's invention names were added https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc226 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc226 (20 hosts! really, big network) but this, again, predates email addresses. Another very early example of email in 1970 was integrated into the NLS (short for Online System) at the SRI ARC https://www.dougengelbart.org/pubs/papers/scanned-original/1986-augment-101931-Workstation-History-and-the-Augmented-Knowledge-Workshop.pdf https://www.dougengelbart.org/pubs/papers/scanned-original/1... but this used usernames and not addresses "mail distribution was addressed by peoples Idents with no need to know or specify which host they used".

jibal 8y ago
"Nowhere in there did anyone invent anything to make email addresses more accessible to people." That's not what it says ... it says trying to make technology more accessible to people. user@hostname email addresses, as opposed to the old UUCP bang paths, does indeed make technology more available to people. (FWIW, I worked on the ARPANET at UCLA and was there when the IMP arrived in 1969, so I do know a little something about this topic.)
- chx 8y ago
  Perhaps what the article tried to say then it's the Domain Naming System which tried to make technology more accessible to people.

Reimersholme 8y ago

Wow, this title would make a perfect fantasy book title.