Trying to Track Down Tony

     I followed Tony Fadell (below) as he moved to a handheld group under Philips, but once he rejoined Apple, after Jobs’ return, he came under its corporate cone of silence. Eventually, he stopped taking my calls. The last time we talked his baby, the iPod, was still a newborn. I asked him how he viewed his job.

“It’s all about looking at all the ingredients out there and thinking deeply about what you can do with them, it’s like a giant 3D jigsaw puzzle where everybody is playing everybody else in real time,” he said. 

Tony played a lead role in a story I commissioned from Richard Doherty, a former EE Times editor who had left journalism to become a consultant in a company he called Envisioneering run out of his home in Seaford, NY.

I knew Richard, an electrical engineer by training, had longstanding ties to Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, so I asked him if he’d write his own first-person account of the rise and fall of General Magic. He delivered an article in diary format that we in the office unofficially titled “Woz & Me.” The actual headline was Diary of a Disaster: General Magic Goes Poof!

Bearded, paunchy and barely five foot tall, Doherty (below) was a kind of Disney dwarf of high tech. He usually wore a suit, though he eventually left the tie at home as tech execs took to wearing khakis and polo shirts. If you dismissed Doherty’s over-caffeinated stream-of-consciousness patter, you’d miss the pungent insights and turns of phrase embedded in the mix. Indeed, even the New York Times quoted him. As a young engineer at Data General (an old East Coast minicomputer company) he even had a walk-on role in Soul of a New Machine, the Tracy Kidder book that helped popularize the computer crowd.

In his OEM article, Doherty recalled Tony was “one of the most promising engineers I’ve met in a long time.” He claimed Fadell had asked him whether he should join General Magic, Apple, or another hot startup. At the time, Doherty was like the rest of us drinking the Kool-Aid straight, no chaser. “General Magic is by far the hottest startup either of us has seen in years,” he wrote.

Doherty’s story recounted how he and Woz bought several of the startup’s first handhelds only to be disappointed by their sluggishness and a laundry list of bugs they shared with their friends at General Magic.

“The poor [infrared communications] performance is particularly wounding to Woz who signed away his IR patents and technology to General Magic,” he recalled.

As for Tony Fadell, he was “clearly distraught,” saddled with the task of helping each corporate partner customize their hardware, a job made more difficult because the startup kept all specs secret. He quoted Tony as saying, “I was told this platform would be open, but all I do is shuttle from Tokyo to Schaumberg to Eindhoven,” where partners were based.

No one ever had so many powerful partners, and each wanted differentiation, Doherty wrote.

By September 1994, Tony left to head a Philips handheld venture. A year later, General Magic had it first and only developer conference. Doherty estimated about 50 developers attended. In June 1996, AT&T shuttered its PersonaLink service, a private wireless data service launched exclusively for the startup. By then, Doherty was already advising major brokerage houses not to invest in the startup.

His article was a companion to an October 1996 cover story (Untold Fortunes: How the cocky consumer startups went bust) about lessons from a half dozen high flying startups that folded. The piece quoted Hertzfeld acknowledging they all knew the fast-rising Internet would have a big impact but “existing business commitments were always more powerful than whatever insight we had about the emergence of the Web.”

The story noted that founders of many of those pre-Web mobile startups were now leading new internet ventures.

Loring Wirbel had been perhaps more prescient than anyone. In an OEM cover story in October 1993 (PDA 2.0: Betting on Cellular) -- when we were all still enamored of General Magic, the Newton and other gizmos -- he wrote, “There are compelling reasons to believe the PDA of the future will be a glorified phone” as opposed to the PC-centric pen computers and high-end organizers of the day.

He also detailed the dismal state of super-sloooow wireless networks (some born of paging systems) and the alphabet soup of modulation schemes they used. Nevertheless, he noted, getting data on phones could be easier than getting voice on computers, a key hurdle because everyone’s preferred means of communication in those days was still a phone call.

Loring’s article mentioned Nokia’s trails in Europe of the Smart Messaging Service (aka SMS) that was part of the new GSM cellular system, one of the early digital (not analog) cellular standards. Texting was not yet a thing.

The story even quoted an optimistic Nokia rep who projected that “by 1997 as much as 20% of phones will be capable of data transmissions.” Imagine that!

Blindly groping in the dark, many even fantasized a slimmed down, B&W version of laptops we called subnotebooks might be a cool way to go. It only took me until September 1994 to lampoon that idea in an OEM article as a “subpar shrink too many.”

And in September 1996, I boldly predicted “a single broadband network will someday replace today’s many wired and wireless narrow and broadband nets…[as] a nirvana.” 

What really happened was savvy software developers paved over the cracks among a succession of 3G, LTE, 5G, Wi-Fi, cable TV and Bluetooth networks so it all more-or-less got us where we wanted to go in cyberspace with a not-too-bumpy ride.

Next: Right device, wrong town