Smoke, Mirrors and Great Coffee
I got to see up close one of the most high-profile mobile startups take a bellyflop.
After I broke a story that General Magic was showing
working systems, I got an invitation to visit the company ahead of its formal
launch. It was my first trip to Silicon Valley as a reporter.
Apple’s Newton was just a whisper then. By contrast, the
General Magic device had panache thanks to its consortium of big-time founders—Apple,
AT&T, Motorola, Philips and Sony. The team sported several software wizards,
veterans of the original Macintosh, including Andy Hertzfeld, a sort of jolly
John Belushi lookalike who designed the Mac’s user interface.
I arrived with a swarm of butterflies fluttering in my
belly. They flapped even harder once I discovered the meeting included Kevin
Kelly, a top reporter from Wired Magazine, and one of his colleagues.
I recall the intoxicating aroma of excellent coffee,
better in those pre-Starbucks days than anything I could get in Hong Kong. It
suffused the startup’s office that commanded the top floor of a low rise just around
the corner from the former Shockley Semiconductor office where, more than 30
years earlier, engineers had built some of the first silicon chips.
Kelly from Wired was clearly a Mac aficionado—I
wasn’t—so he tended to dominate the interviews. During a break, I wandered
around looking for a hardware guy and found a fat kid in cutoffs no one was
talking to, Tony Fadell. He didn’t have much to tell me about the guts of the
handheld they were working on, but he was clearly the most hardware-centric of
the folks I met that day, so I made a mental note to stay in touch with him.
For all the startup’s software royalty and a high-profile
launch event with all the corporate partners, both the device and the Apple Newton
that followed it a few months later quickly crashed back to Earth, largely for
the same reasons as the Palmtop PC; they were too big, heavy and useless.
General Magic’s much-touted Telescript network programming
language was a sort of precursor to Sun Microsystem’s Java, a scripting language
that became the de facto software foundation for accessing services on early
cellphones.
Hertzfeld’s mobile interface (above), in hindsight, was like the first cartoon of e-commerce. It portrayed a man walking down a street and stepping into shops to buy stuff. It was cute but hardly efficient, and there was nothing much in the virtual shops to buy anyway.
Still, I found Hertzfeld smart and accessible. In
September 1996, a few months after General Magic imploded, I did a one-on-one
interview with him for OEM. In the interview, I asked him about Internet
phones, a common term in those days more than a decade before Jobs announced a
product called the iPhone.
Hertzfeld (below) essentially predicted the future of mobile
and cloud computing. “I believe your entire hard disk and user state will want
to live in the network, especially for handheld devices,” he said.
He foresaw the important roles speech and 3D graphics would play. And he believed someday users would create their own computer interfaces without learning programming languages, something which has more-or-less come true.
He was quick to praise Java for riding the emerging
enthusiasm for the Web, and admitted Telescript had been “two or three steps
ahead of what was needed.”
Like Gates, Hertzfeld also complained about the lack
of progress getting to broadband wireless networks.
“When we started General Magic, wireless was a very
big component of what we were trying to do, and it seems like here it is, six
years later, and things haven’t evolved significantly. It’s been frustrating. But
you know it will eventually come.”
And he showed a bit of his nerd ego, explaining why he
would not return to Apple which he saw as too corporate after Steve Jobs was
pushed out in 1985 and before Jobs returned in 1987. “I own more of the Mac’s soul [than teams of
Apple software developers today] because I was the first one to work on it and
set the direction,” Hertzfeld said.
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