All language subtitles for General Magic (2018)_en

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In Silicon Valley
there's a lot of origin stories

of companies that were at--
had the right idea,
but were completely

at the wrong time
and yet they paved
the path for everything else.

There are
a handful of stories
that define Silicon Valley.

You know, there are legends,
and General Magic was one
of the legends.

You have to believe,
you have to be proud,
you have to be

absolutely convinced
that you're gonna bend
the way the world is moving,

and you're going to take
it in a different direction.

If you're always playing it
safe and you're not failing

there's a very high probability
you are not doing anything
particularly important.

No matter how big
we dreamed, the fact
that you could touch

the lives of billions,
billions,

it was vaguely
imaginable,

but the scale of it
was inconceivable.

The reason
you should care about
the story of General Magic

is because it involves
something fundamental,

and that is...
failure isn't the end.

Failure is actually
the beginning.

The reason this story
so haunts the people
that were involved,

that they still live with it,
is because they knew
that they were right.

Did it fail?
I mean, the company itself
failed, the ideas didn't fail.

The people who worked
there didn't fail.
So, was it a failure?

I was in high school.

Sixteen at the time.

I didn't really wanna
go to class. Every waking
moment that I wasn't in school

I was on the computer,
learning something about it,
programming and doing something.

Talking to friends about it,
I was the geek, you know,
The Revenge of the Nerds.

For me every weekend was fixing
things, or building things,
from the age of three or four.

Soapbox derby racer,
or we could repair
lawnmowers or what have you.

But with this I could create
new things. I could sit there
and I could program a game,

or I could program graphics,
I could do things and you spoke
a language no one else knew

and you could tell people about
it and they were like, wow.

And then it was the Mac
and it was all about the Mac.

What is that?

There were names of people like
Andy Hertzfeld, Joanna Hoffman,
Bill Atkinson,

rock stars in Rolling Stone,
but had nothing to do with
music. They were my heroes.

My name is Andy Hertzfeld,
I bought and fell in love
with an Apple II in 1978.

And went to work for Apple
in 1979 and was lucky enough
to help design the Macintosh.

You have to go
and find out more about them,

and how can I go work with them,
because I wanted to be
like them.

Hello,
I am Macintosh. It sure is
great to get out of that bag.

January 24th 1984,

uh, the Macintosh was being
publicly introduced

to the world,
for the very first time.

You know what
I remember? We were sitting here

and there was this roar,
just sort of like a sound
wave coming, coming at us.

It was a culmination of years of
work, of years of expectation.

This was it.

What we are trying to do
with Macintosh is take away

yet another barrier
to usage of personal computers.

One of the neatest things
about Macintosh was
we had a chance

to change the way that people
thought of computers.

We called it the computer
for the rest of us,

because computers
weren't for ordinary people.

We thought we had a chance to
make a difference. Steve Jobs
just drummed it into us.

He was just such
a brilliant motivator.

The greatest people are
self-managing. They don't
need to be managed.

What they need
is a common vision.

Once they know what to do,
they'll go figure out
how to do it.

We truly believed
with every fiber of our being

that if we can solve
that problem of, um,
making computers accessible

to an ordinary person by making
them easy enough to use,

we could truly change the world.

But behind the scenes,

behind that facade,
things were changing.

Steve Jobs was involved
in palace politics.

That was much bigger
at that moment than the Mac.

I was just too tunnel-visioned
to be able to appreciate that.

I got a phone call, like
around 10:00 a.m. in the morning

from someone on the Mac team
saying, "You won't believe this,
but Steve got fired."

The core team was stunned.
That said, things were a mess
in many ways.

But Steve and John Sculley
didn't agree about
what to do with it.

Fights escalated to the point
where the board told Sculley

that he had to remove Steve.

Um, wrenching decision
for everyone,

both Steve and Sculley
and everyone close to them.

Since the Mac,

really I think we were all
looking for the next thing

-because it really
jaded us for anything else.
- Yes.

Any other project
that kept coming up,
kinda fizzled very quickly

because it didn't have
the grandness of the vision,

it didn't have the grandness
of potential impact.

And now what?

Good evening, I'm Marc Porat.

Today many people believe
that information tools

are the third technology
to change the course
of civilization.

Changing our relationship
to nature, to each other,

to the very way
we experience reality.

The Aspen Institute attracted
some of the most amazing people.

It had a place where they could
speak freely to each other
in private.

Cyrus Vance or Henry Kissinger
or the Shahbanou of Iran or--

Very, very powerful people that
you would never expect to meet.

Those were the people, that was,
that was the teaching there,
you could,

and in fact,
you were responsible and had
a mandate to invent the future.

Because the future your parents
handed you, that was broken.

And so that started me in the
track of saying, "What can I do
to create the future?"

There comes a moment
where for some reason
you are in the future,

and you see something very,
very clearly. You just see it.

That's what happened to me,
and I went into the future,

and I saw the world which,
which I thought was very real
and very tangible.

And I stood
in that moment, inside it,
and I looked around my-- me,

and it was there, it was
all there. It was basically
the General Magic vision.

It was gonna be so revolutionary
that it would take over
the world.

So this book I wrote in 1989
and this was a compilation
of, of the ideas.

And it was called
Pocket Crystal.

And this is
what we came up with in 1989.

And there it is,
we really had it.

We definitely had it.

Business is just stories.
That's what people do,
they tell stories.

And they-- and the ones who tell
the most compelling stories
are the ones who,

you know, end up making the most
progress forward and Marc was
a great story teller.

After Steve Jobs left in 1985,
a lot of people were pretty
depressed,

and they wondered what Apple's
future was going to be like.

You know, could Apple still
go on without Steve Jobs there?

Marc was one of the first people
to see that computing in
the future was gonna be,

not just about computation,
it was gonna be about
communications,

it was gonna be about content
and it was gonna be very,
very personal.

Something that you could
hold in your hand.

And it was a telephone,
it was essentially going
to be a smartphone

with a lot
of intelligence in it.

Imagine a personal computer,
with applications organized

around these personal
wants and needs.

An object through which you
communicated with yourself
about everything

that you're thinking about.
It was the way you reached out
and touched other people,

and it was the way that
you reach beyond that
into the larger world.

Marc always came with his giant
red book, uh, and he would thumb
through the pages

and, uh,
he was able to romance me,

he was able to romance
Bill Atkinson, Andy Hertzfeld.

Please leave
a message and we will return

your call
as quickly as possible.

I saw a message on my answering
machine from Bill Atkinson

who was my mentor
at Apple, my hero.

"I just saw
the greatest thing ever.

You got to come back to
Apple to work with me on it."

And the very next day Marc Porat
came over to my house with his
models and stuff.

Wouldn't it be nice,
if all these notes,
which are very useful,

I could have with me
when I needed them.
Wouldn't it be nice I suppose,

if letters that were important,
arrived, fell out of the sky.

I was a little skeptical
at first, because Marc
is such a slick salesperson,

but I saw that, hey,
this is pretty cool.

And when I saw this,
the concept and
I talked to Marc,

I got the same butterflies
in my stomach.

The same feeling that I had
when I first encountered
the Macintosh.

This book was not just ideas,

not just possibilities,

but this was a complete
and thorough collection

of the vision of the future,
scenario by scenario.

Marc said, "We are gonna
create what comes after
the personal computer."

"John," he said, "I think this
can be the future of Apple,

but I'm not sure it
can be done inside of Apple.

I think it's got to be
a separate company."

I helped Marc get the investment
from the Apple board.

So Apple ended up
spinning out General Magic.

This was the beginning
of what became, I think,
the most important company

to come out of Silicon Valley
that nobody had ever heard of.

There was this
aura of secrecy.

We knew the people that went in.

We knew they were smart people.

You know it had Apple's
fairy dust sprinkled on it.

So we had no idea what it was,

but by the rumors
it seemed just captivating.

There's this company,
it has Andy and Bill and,

and they're going off
to do something.

And I was like, "I don't know
what they are doing yet,
but I know I need to be there."

I was dressed up,
I had my suit coat and a tie,

and I was there at about
8:30 in the morning.

I knocked on the door,
no one answered,
so I opened the door

and it was very quiet and I'm
like, "Where is everybody?"

And I look over and there are
two people in this office

and they had been there all
night, and they looked at me
with these dazed eyes

and they were like, "We're
not hiring." And that was it.

Everybody in
the valley knew that Magic was--
was doing something really cool,

and really hot, they didn't
know exactly what it was.

Everybody wanted to be there
and people literally would
sleep on the doorstep

to try to get an interview
or get into the building.

I mean from your
perspective, is this unique?

Or is this everywhere in
the valley and not so special?

No, no it's
not everywhere in the valley!

The best, the brightest
the coolest, the smartest.

Hi Megan, welcome aboard.

Oh, smile!
You are on "Candid Camera."

I was always
building things.

I come from a long line
of engineers. And so the idea
of going to Silicon Valley

and learning
with these extraordinary
people how to make products

and create things
and do just amazing things,

that's what I wanted to do,
it was drawing me.

Andy Hertzfeld had gotten
my name as a Mac developer,
and so he called me.

I'm sorry to offend you
with this Non Disclosure
Agreement...

But he couldn't tell me what it
was, and I was just thinking,

"Oh my god I am talking to
Andy Hertzfeld right now."

My parents are looking at
me going, "I don't know anything

about this General Magic.
Why don't you go to
a company you know, like

IBM or Microsoft, can't you go
there, where it's well known?"

I'm like, "No, I wanna go
work for General Magic."

He would call me ten, fifteen
times a day just begging,

"Please get my resume"
and he would just ask me,

"Please, I will not stop
until I work there."

And so I go into
the interview, first thing in,

people sat me down on the floor,
ripped my tie off, ripped off
my jacket and said,

"That's not how we work here."
So I go home back to Michigan,
packed up all my things,

and put them in a car
and then I'm like,
I got to hear something.

So I called Dee. "What's
going on?" "We have a process,
we are going through it.

We are gonna have a meeting
we will talk about you,
we will let you know."

He would not
stop calling me.

Then I started calling
like every day.

I said, "please call him
because he is driving me crazy."

-I got the call.
"Congratulations

you got the job,"
and I just went nuts.

Email from me
to John Sculley: "We realize
that the root of our strength

was that we understood how
people use information machines
better than anyone else.

This is our early vision
for the product.

A tiny computer, a phone,
a very personal object.

It must be beautiful.

It must offer the kind of
personal satisfaction that
a fine piece of jewelry brings.

It will have a perceived value
even when it is not being used.

It should offer the comfort
of a touchstone.

The tactile
satisfaction of a seashell.
The enchantment of a crystal.

Once you use it, you won't
be able to live without it.

It's just not another telephone.

It must be something else."

So a lot of people in the
valley they have this idea

that they're, that they're
changing the world and they say
that a lot.

They sometimes call themselves
"chief change agents,"
and stuff like that.

It's mostly bullshit, uh,
but they have to believe it in
order, you know, you don't make

a photo app and you're not
changing the world with a photo
app. You're just not.

It's not solving cancer,
it's not solving poverty,
it's not solving climate change.

You know, they all have
this idea that they are
doing something bigger

than what the actual thing is,
but it's like the car,
the lightbulb,

it's the idea of
a computer in your pocket,
it's a really big idea.

This device that allows them
to access everything.

But back then,
there wasn't an internet,

there wasn't the worldwide
network of information.

There weren't people using it,
there wasn't cell phones then,

'cause there wasn't, you know,
wireless, like everything
there wasn't, wasn't.

The reason I started
covering it, was because
when I saw it, I was like, "Oh!

This is where it leads."
The idea of mobile computing,
uhm, started at General Magic.

-Hi guys, I've got the chips
from Motorola.
-Yeah.

Yay, all right, all right.

Cool.

When you started to hear about
the different people that were
also there, it was like

Dan Winkler?
Dan Winkler's here? I know Dan

I would read all of his books!
There was Scott Knaster,
Jimmy Freelander,

Susan Kare, "They're here too?"

Uhm, what am I doing right now?
Uhm...

Picking that "Paradigm" movie.

And then, all of
a sudden,
Andy Hertzfeld walks by,

Joanna Hoffman walks by,
and you're like,
"Oh my god!" You know.

"Aah," you know,
you're resonating, like
the rock stars are here.

- And then they just sit
down on the floor next to you!
-How are you doing?

It wasn't just the best
of the Apple of the 80's.

It was the best of Apple early
90's that were all coming.

And here is this whole
team of people bubbling

and bursting, you know,
and I'm still trying to
figure out how to get along.

I have this kind of longer hair
and I got my high tops
from Detroit.

I was the lowest guy on the
totem pole, you know, "Give him
some stuff and try things."

-I was worried the chips
had bugs in them.
-Cut your hands.

I was only going into
engineering because I knew that
it would be like a tool kit

I could use until
someone would hire me.

But then I got into it, and
it turns out, oh jeez, you know,

like I was actually really
good at circuit design, like
who knew, you know, who knew?

The service I would most like to
see would be a shopping service.

I could order everything,
from my Teletouch.

A lot of times people
in their twenties are out,
you know,

in the bars and hanging out,
but our twenties are spent

you know, just powering through,
with each other, building these
extraordinary things together.

-...the camera.

- Ooh!
- Tony, was that you?

You know, I hadn't had that many
first days of jobs before

and I wondered, "Is the first
day of every job like this?"

-The answer to that is no.
- Zed,
the cell broke open.

I met Andy Hertzfeld
for the first time,
he was already famous, I knew

what he looked like. In my world
he was one of the superstars,
and it is a little embarrassing

to put it this way, but that
was, that was pretty much like
falling in love.

-OK! Let's-- let's try to, uh,
start the meeting,

the-- the first, uh,
the first obvious thing
to mention is-- is

that we are not alone here
today. we're being filmed
for posterity.

It'll be a good historical
or hysterical document, uh,

some time in the future anyway,
and so...

Well, I was the black sheep.
I was a filmmaker.

I'd never heard of a startup.

I'm wired and wired
for Sam here.

It shouldn't, it shouldn't
be too disruptive.

What I understood
was that these people were

doing something
so charmingly different,

so charmingly new. So...fun.

And you could trust them
because what they were driven
towards, wasn't a job,

the job never came up,
the salary never came up.

It was where we were headed,
we were going to change
the world.

We all basically sat on the
floor-- no, I did not. They all
basically sat on the floor

to talk about what it was,
what are we gonna call
this handheld product.

We've been talking about
possible names,
what is the device?

One of the things that's really
special is that it's in my
pocket with me all the time.

It's a very different thing than
computers. It's something that
is in my pocket

and I run my life out of it
and through it.

It was this notion of anytime,
anywhere communication.

The notion that it wasn't
just gonna be a phone,

but you could do
all these other things
with it, to integrate all that

into one thing
that I could hold in my hand.

I thought, "Oh my god,

if I could have one of those."

I'm ready. And that was
how things started.

- We're rolling.
-Oh yeah?

-Show us what's in the box.
-Uhm. OK.

We are trying to make something
that people love. We need it
to be like your watch,

you know, it feels like you're
saying your watch, your glasses,
your, your, um, your wallet.

Something that you like
the color, you like
the way it feels.

You know this is a huge, ugly
thing, but, um, we had to
start somewhere, we had to start

with components that we could
buy off the shelf because
you're--

you're working from, uh--
You're working from wishes
and ideas

of how you wish it would be
and real components

that you can buy that are cheap
enough that you can make the
product reasonable

so people can afford it
because if it cost
a million dollars, forget it.

Was that the first
one or the begin--
in the beginning?

This is in the very beginning
and, um, one of the problems
with this,

was that the touchscreen
was extremely noisy.

And it just didn't have
the resolution, it would
be a horrible experience

for people to use this thing.
So that was actually
our hardest component.

We were pushing the envelope
on every single front,

so we're figuring out what size
should it be, what sensor,

what electric plug should
it have, how many buttons
should we have if any.

The feeling was
that anything was possible.
You could shoot

as high as you wanted to here
and as a team we were gonna
be able to do it.

The purpose of doing
all this, is to go out and--
and create prototypes

so that the team can
plug them into the Mac
and run the software

behind it and experience
what a user would experience.

The array
of personalities, they were
all like nuclear power plants,

each one of them
working on solving
these difficult problems.

For me the challenge was
challenging myself to try
and work at that level.

I was a newbie. A lot of people
got to just do, you know, if
you're the young guy in the team

you had to learn and do.
So you had to work double
or triple time.

He was our college kid.

I'm hooking up
a demo so that we can see

keyboards working
with the device.

Tony wanted to learn
everything, from everyone.

Whatever it was, yes!
And more of it and how can
I do more to help.

- Is it important?
-Uh, if you want to hook up
disc drives

and things of that nature, yeah.
It's really important.

I wanted to make it work
really seamlessly and fast.

This is basically
our first test of our--
our-- basically a first demo

of our peripheral system
for the-- for the walkabout.

And this was a technology
to string peripherals together.

Today we call it USB,
and so we were creating USB
before the world knew about it.

- Oh god.
- It finally works.

We decided to make everything.
I mean, we were making it all.

See right now the whole class
viewable texture is one
formatter for everything.

That meant we were custom
building every piece, it's kind
of like hand assembling a car

rather than using a factory.
And so it's, it's insane,
it's insane.

In many projects,
you might build one or two
innovative break-out things,

and then you build on top
of a lot of existing stuff,
you kind of stand on

the shoulders of giants,
and we weren't doing that
at General Magic, we were

building the giant from the toes
all the way up to its head.

We couldn't find
a touch screen to solve
this problem, in fact,

at one point,
let me see if I can find it.

At one point, we had to
invent one.

This Wendell, who works for
Wendell Sander, he came up
with this idea

of a touch screen that would be
balanced on four points

and as you pushed on it you
could, you could sense touch.

So as you touch it
in any particular place,

you can do the math,
so you do the whole force

minus the X and Y and you can
figure out where you are.

Whether you are touching T
or whether you're touching
Caps Lock.

- How small will
it finally be, do you think?
-Some day?

Dick Tracy wrist watch,
but...

Right now, in the beginning, we
are starting with a screen size
that's probably about that big.

Technically it was really,
really hard to build something
the size of those models.

Uh, the technology just wasn't
there yet, but, hey,
that was ok,

to build something a little
clunkier for the first
generation,

we knew, uh,
if it caught on, it would
eventually get down there.

The touchscreen
is a little funky.

What was this thing
gonna look like? You know,
we knew what size screen

we were gonna have,
but we didn't know that early

everything we're gonna
put on that screen.

The thing
about computer programming

is you're making something
out of nothing.

This is not nerds
creating for others nerds here.

There is a creative
process here that is much like

making a film or painting
a picture or doing a play.

This is very creative, which is
a surprise to a lot of people.

-This is a very
creative process.
- You mean artistic?

-Artistic? You mean artistic.
-Yeah.

I'll ask him about them, OK?

Yeah, that's absolut--
that got the crew yesterday.

The common ground between
Apple and what we did

at General Magic
in the sixties was idealism.

Our art could make a difference
in, in the lives of everyone,

everyone you know
and everyone you don't know.

I think, uh, communications
is the most fundamentally
human thing that we do,

and that's really why what
we are doing cuts to the heart
of-- of-- of who we are.

Uh, that's what distinguishes
people more than any other thing
I think, the, uh,

the sense of community,
a sense of, of, reaching out
from yourself to someone else.

One of the things Bill and I do
is just by word of mouth
passing, passing

that spirit down, down
to the next generation.

We were always saying, wow,
wouldn't it be great if we did
that and Andy would do this,

he would stay up all night
coding the thing that we just
came up with

the idea that evening. He would
stay up all night and bring in

a fully working thing
the next morning.

So we created this
concept of different rooms,
and Andy went off

and over the weekend
he completely rewrote the system

to implement this hallways
thing. So we come back
and it's all there.

That shouldn't have been
possible for one person to do
that much work in one go.

Passion is the thing
that breaks through logic

and makes you try
to get every part right,

not because of some science,
but because of

your feeling of pride and desire
to do something great.

All you have to do
is tap on this little letter
creating icon

and, uh, your favorite
stationary pops out

of the drawer. You notice
it looks like a little postcard.

There was mail,
there was calendar, everything
was communicating

with each other
and tiny little things
that would delight people

that would wink at people that
would just make it so special.

One interesting area
we-- we haven't done is--
is expressing emotions.

Uh, what-- what extent would you
use to express anger at someone.

Emoticons, today,
emoticons are a big deal.

In those days no one knew what
it was, there was no such thing.

Andy and Bill would disappear
and come back with emoticons

that were animated. They were
amazingly cute and intelligent.

Only one person hated
the happy face. It's like--

-Who was that?

I've certainly
never worked with a team as
ambitious. It's almost like

we didn't care about what made
sense. You know, how else could
it be good enough?

There was, uh, confidence,
even arrogance there too.

Are you kidding me?
This is, this is fun!

It was like we
could walk through walls
and do anything.

Being there with
all these people who were
like, "We can change the world

and we're going to do it
and let me show you how."

They were on
a joy ride, a rocket ride

with all the freedom
to do what they wanted to do.

Now it's getting them
to understand this thing
costs money.

Real money.

In 1990 there was no digital
telecommunications industry.

It did not exist,
anywhere in the world.

We were in the analog era,
there were no

digital cellphones,
there was no World Wide Web.

We were talking
about bringing millions
of people onto a network

that had to be industrial
strength, reliable,

and run 24 by 7 by 365
with no glitches.

Who else could do that,
but the telephone company?

That's who we needed,
and that meant AT&T.

The AT&T folks came
in this gigantic stretched
limo that was too big

to get into the parking lot
and I was watching them out
of the window

of the second floor conference
room. Watching them trying
to maneuver the car

into the parking lot.
They just couldn't do it.

So they eventually got out
of their car and they
trouped upstairs.

We're still waiting for Bill
and people are staring
at their shoes

and a little uncomfortable.
That was not a good start.

-Um...
- What happened?

So Bill finally shows up.
Um, he hadn't taken
a shower in a week.

He was wearing a Hawaiian shirt,
he stunk like a goat.

You could see the noses wrinkle
on the faces of
the three AT&T guys,

but they launched the demo.

- This is a touchscreen?
So I can ahead go and touch it.
- Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

No one had ever thought
of the kind of ideas

that Marc, Bill and Andy
had instantiated in this demo.

...another step.
Would you like a cookie?

-Oh no. I've eaten too many.
-Would you like a cookie?

The AT&T folks said, "We're in,"
and they joined us as
the first network partner.

You got to have AT&T,
you got to have Apple,

that's your roots.

You got to have Motorola and
Sony, they make the devices.

And you got to have Phillips.

They're also gonna
make devices.

Without those, we couldn't
have been General Magic.

And we charged them
six million dollars for the
privilege of joining... each.

Here was this little startup
in Silicon Valley, that was
gonna change the world,

everybody was afraid of being
left out of the vision.

This company's scale is small,
but thinking so big.

Immediately we
decided to join it

Yes, just, boom,
one second, we decided.

Sony Japan
was unbelievably great,
but I think one of the things

that Marc underestimated is how
each one of those relationships

contributed to an enormous
level of complexity.

...he said we have these three
bears out there, and we call
them Goldilocks.

-We're gonna dance
with the three bears.

- Marc is Goldilocks.
-I find him, grraawr, grraawr!

-Gurrhr!

I thought you grraawr, grraawr!

The vision was gonna
happen because we were
putting together

16 of the largest companies
on the planet

who are natural enemies,
into-- into the same room
at the same time.

We knew we were innovating,
no one had done anything like
that, and if it succeeded

it would change everything and
that took a war-like energy.

That was fighting,
that was battle.

We had no choice,
but to keep quiet about
the things we were doing

because other companies
were interested in it as well,
and we tried to keep secrecy

at a level that would give a
small company like General Magic
time to create, time to develop.

Everybody had
to shred everything. We couldn't
put everything in one bin.

We had to wait and--
and kind of dole it out
to various different places.

We were asked not to talk
about it outside

of the office because we didn't
want any of it leaked.

So there was this buzz around
the company, but it really was
kind of this, this, cipher.

We had to keep it under wraps.
Part of that was
this PR strategy

that we had only one shot
to make news.

"While we're
in business development stage,
security is essential.

If the concept leaks,
we lose our competitive edge.

Please use the highest level
of personal attention
to security, including,

if asked by an Apple colleague
not on the team, say nothing.

If asked by a non-Apple
person, tell me immediately."

Now it should be noted,
John Sculley was running Apple
at the time.

In that sense
he was our ally,
or so we thought.

I was getting intense pressure
from the Apple board and from
the Apple management team

as to why was I spending
so much time on General Magic.

And Apple was developing
in parallel a business
that it owned 100% of,

called Newton, and that looked
like they could ship a product.

Ten years ago we launched
Macintosh, a revolution
for the desktop.

And today we are launching
Newton, a revolution
for the pocket.

John Sculley gave a keynote
address at the 1993

consumer electronic shows
where he announced
what we were doing.

Imagine being able to take
a cellular telephone
and be able to be paged

on the phone and write a little
note and fax it off to someone
else in response.

Except he announced it
as something Apple was doing.
We thought Apple wasn't doing it

and we found out from
that speech that they were.

I wish I could say
that I was hurt. I wasn't--

I wasn't just hurt, I was angry.
I was fur-- I was really angry.

They had, uh,
decided to make something

essentially based on
Marc's models.

I thought Newton was,
I thought that they could
co-exist, you know.

And, so I wasn't really
concerned that Newton
would hurt General Magic.

They were our closest partner
who really gave us
our life.

And so when we found out that
they were trying to kill us,
we felt completely betrayed.

You wanna know about the
Newton? I'll tell you about
the Newton, #### the Newton.

The Newton
announcement caused vision envy

on the part of all
of our partners.

They thought that Sculley's
was bigger than theirs.

"I want that vision thing. Do
that vision thing for me too."

And so
they wanted to immediately
go up there and introduce.

We've got to explain
the vision such that
everybody gets it.

The press gets it,
the corporations get it,
it's all clear.

Leading the way to
a new age of personal
communication,

creating a revolutionary
electronic messaging
environment.

We call this environment,
the Cloud.

The fact
that the Newton was going
to ship and it was getting

all this publicity meant
that we had to come out
of stealth mode

earlier than we had planned
and well before we were
ready to ship.

Stakes are higher, you better
be better than these guys.

Big event? This was
huge and we made it huge

on purpose to raise
the jeopardy.

We knew it was gonna be
a marathon that we were
gonna run at sprint speed.

It was gonna take everything
out of us. Down the torpedoes,
it's full speed ahead.

This is it, we're coming,
these amazing devices.

- You remember
much about that day?
- Yeah, well,

I remember my impression
of Marc was, "Huh,

most of the vision of Jobs,
but he had better interface".

Presenting Marc Porat.

Today we are going
to introduce the vision.

Today we are introducing
the technology,
introducing The Alliance.

But let it be said
it's about feelings.

How you feel about
the communication
with another person.

To me the relationships
of your life, is the fabric
of your life.

That's the stuff that defines
who we are as people.

Marc was one of
the most charismatic presenters
you could ever imagine.

But let me just hold it up for
you, so you can see what this
thing is, you know, about.

Its intent is to be
with me all the time.

The thing about Porat
when he speaks is,
everybody in the audience

says to themselves
two things, they say,
"My god this guy is right.

I can go to
the roof of this building
and if I jump, I will fly."

And the second thing
they would think is,
"And that guy up there on stage,

and me, we're the only
two guys who really get it."

This, we hope will be
with you as simply part
of your existence.

It will be that useful.
The minute I see it in a store,
I smile.

It's about having fun,
it's about leisure,
it's about entertainment.

I just recall listening to him
and thinking, "Yes, yes!"

When we were talking
about re-inventing telephony,
we meant it. This is inexorable.

The world of personal
communications, when it's
fulfilled, uh, possibly

in one generation, when I say
generation, I mean my children,
my son and daughter.

When they walk
around with these things
they will be wireless.

Reporters would
leave these briefings saying,

"My god, uh, forget the story
I'm writing, I want that.

The world that they just
described to me,

I want to live in that world,
I want my kids to live
in that world."

A tiny gadget
that combines the telephone,

a fax machine,
and a personal computer.

Cellular phone,
a pocket pager and a notepad.

Sounds a bit like
something from Star Trek, you
can send and receive messages,

order tickets, get the latest
headlines or stock quotes
and also you can talk on it.

It was wall to wall coverage.
New York times, Wall Street
Journal, L.A. Times.

It was front page
in the Economist,

front page on the Wall Street
Journal. No small thing.

If this works
the way this industry
wants it to work,

this is going to be huge,
I mean, you are talking about

the potential for hundreds of
millions of devices eventually.

IBM is conspicuously absent from
the alliance. So is Microsoft,

which is racing to develop
its own personal communicating
software standard.

Some say
it's revolutionary.
Others simply say it's magic.

So we got a ton of coverage,
a ton of coverage,

and that's also where,
the first questions where,

"Well, this is, this is huge.

Are they going to be able
to actually fulfill
on that vision?"

Marc Porat
the President and CEO
and co-founder of General Magic.

Thank you very much for being
here. What do you see as your--
your startup date

to actually have one of these
things in somebody's hand?

We'll be talking about dates
and about product features

in some detail this summer,
but I did want to have a chance
to answer your--

In other words nobody is saying
when one of these is gonna be
available?

- That's correct.
-OK, OK. So--

I caution--
I-- I-- I counsel caution...

...written record of it.
Um, but what we have,
we have sort of...

It did not go smoothly
after that at all.

Moments where somebody has
to start doing something and,
uh, what we have decided is

that for each of those important
moments we want to make sure
that there is

real responsibility for someone
to, you know, to-- to say,

"I am at this important moment,
you'll start doing your work."

Marc and Bill
and Andy together decided,
"Well, this is the person

to manage the engineering team."
That's what they-- that's what
they wanted me to do.

And then there was
this one day where
I came to talk to all of them

at once and they said,
"Oh we don't need a manager.

We don't want you, because
we don't need a manager.
Our leader, our leaders

are Andy and Bill. Uh, that's
what makes this place great,
is we don't have managers."

"We can be
engineers without a manager
and we know what's best.

Managers are just going to get
in the way. We don't need
program managers,

we don't need any of that stuff.
We are just going to
make it happen."

There was a fearlessness
and a sense of correctness,

no questioning
of "Could I be wrong?" None.

Because that's what
you need to break
out of earth's gravity,

you need-- you need
an enormous amount of momentum.

And that momentum comes
from suppressing introspection

about the possibility
of failure.

The Alliance was the
biggest and most complicated

consortium of global companies
that had been created

up until that time
in American business.

You had competitors
at the table.

Sony and Panasonic
hated each other,

and it made it
hard for them to commit

fully to our business.

We needed to become independent,

and the only way
we could do that

was buy selling stock
to the public.

It was the first,
so called, concept IPO,

which is when a company could
go public without any revenue,

let alone any profits.

What made that possible?
The imprimatur of Goldman Sachs.

Goldman Sachs was the gold
standard for investment banking.

If Goldman was going to do
your initial public offering,
it meant that you too

met the gold standard for
being a real company
with real prospects.

Didn't have a product,
didn't have a revenue stream,

but, you know, it seemed cool
at the time, let's invest.

The best investment
bankers came to pitch us.

One of them came and said,
"I must have a piece of the IPO.

What would it take, what--
if I gave you the shirt off
my back, would that do it?

And I said, "Yeah. It would!"
And he stripped down...

-Don't film this stuff.

And there we were
standing in the conference room
with a half-naked banker.

He got the deal,
he participated in the IPO.

Where is that
happening?

Right here.

So then they didn't make
any 44260s in five volts without
this, right, enable thing?

Probably the most
challenging part of the product
was deciding what not to do.

What to do and what not to do,
because it's really hard,
you're building

a very complex platform.
And so just often things
would take longer.

For me, I had never
done anything like that.
It was a huge challenge.

You really had to work very hard
to build what we were
trying to build.

I really had to up my game
and they were all like,
"Fadell you're doing it wrong.

You should be doing it
that way." And I'm like, "No,
I think it's the right way."

But I couldn't really articulate
the way they could. So yeah,

-I had to challenge myself
and kinda go into the dark hole.
-A3 Volts...

Once we got the basics
there, you take the new chip
that had

whatever the latest software
that everybody had put together,

pop it in and begin to see
the screen come to life.

We could see it,
we could touch it and feel it.

But the responsiveness of
the device was really slow. Uh,
the processor was underpowered,

for example. So the experience
was a bit tap... tap...

And, you know, kind of annoying.

I was sitting in a lot
of the user test labs.

The engineers would sit there
and say, "No, lady,
what are you doing?

Don't, don't tap that. No, it's
not there, it's over there!"

And we'd all go, "Ooh."
There was some comedy there.

The thing
at the bottom that kinda
looks like a comb,

I haven't the slightest idea
what that is.

This doesn't look
like it's working.

- Is this noise
supposed to be here?

- OK, we've crashed.
We just crashed.
- Uh-oh.

It had this little top hat.

Like some operating systems
had little spinning wheels

or a top hat would
just start spinning.

And just start spinning
and just keep spinning.

You just stare
at this ####### thing.

Finally you just pull out
the battery and reset
the device,

because there is
no point in waiting.

- target for
re-bunking.

It's not my fault,
is it? It's the software
engineer.

And, you know, it's slowly
dawning on us, like we are not
gonna get this done.

This isn't a finished
program by any means, is it?

The roadshow for
the General Magic
public offering

was flying around in a private
jet, flying first class,

staying in the best hotels and
having people sit at our feet
and lap up what we were saying.

The closest thing it comes to
is touring with a rock band.

We've got a roadie crew
that has to set up
the cameras and the big screen

to make sure that people
can see the demonstration
of the device.

What we envisioned is something
in your hand that's with you
all the time, that allows you

to have access whether it's
for fun or more importantly for
mission critical applications.

All we did was
demonstrate the device.

I would go out in the hallway
and I would pretend to be
an airline company

and Marc would make an airline
reservation, and in real time,
Marc would reserve a flight,

and blow people away
because no one had ever
seen anything like it.

We've got tools,
we've got partners.

We've got markets that are
happening all around us.

-Give us a clap.

Great. That's the right stuff.

The roadshow succeeded
beyond everybody's wild
expectations.

The first concept public
offering in Silicon Valley
history

and we raised a total of, uh,
96 million dollars.

That's about as good
as it gets.

We were kings of the universe,
and it was really fun.

Today we would call it
going viral. The press loved us.

They heard the vision,
they saw what was going on,
and whoop! They're in.

I was just afraid Marc thought
things were just too easy to do.

How are you gonna get
the price point? How are you
gonna keep it from crashing?

How are you gonna make it
fast enough? How are you
gonna make it readable?

I just didn't think
he was focused on that stuff.

We were so distracted
by all the articles,

that we started to believe
our own-- our own tale.

You know that we're
gonna conquer the world,
but yet we hadn't finished.

We were not paying attention
to the other external trends
that were happening around us,

because we were aiming
so far out in the future.
It was like the--

the current context around us
really wasn't considered
that relevant,

because we were aiming to far
out. But boy was that relevant.

Put simply
the internet is just
a network of networks.

In recent years,
a relatively unknown
communication system,

called the Internet,
has exploded in popularity
with such intensity

that it's predicted that over
25 million people will be
using it by the year 1998...

And we had an intern who's like,
"Hey everybody,

it's all about the Web. You
guys are totally missing it."
He was telling us this.

It was probably late 94' early
95' and you could go to every
Website at that time.

There was a list of them
and you could go and visit
all of the Websites.

And it was all very rough,
you know there was mostly text.

Uh, having graphics was leading
edge and we were working on
this rich multimedia system

with audio and graphics
and things animating
and the richness was far beyond

what the web was, but the web
had-- had worldwide reach.

This other force
had appeared and we weren't
looking at it, you know.

We were in bed with AT&T
with our private cloud.

The whole point about having
a closed network is that people
had to pay to use it,

and that's where AT&T was going
to generate it's revenue.

The problem was pivoting toward
the World Wide Web, that would
have meant cannibalizing

or perhaps even wrecking AT&T's
business model and we just
couldn't do it.

I have to invest the time,
the time to keep banging
on the web

with my mouse and my keyboard
because unless I do that nothing
happens. The web is passive.

But even though it was
all here, right in front of us,

we were unable to see
that was the way to go.

One of our
developers, Pierre Omidyar,
very quiet, soft spoken guy.

He had a Webpage, and down
at the bottom it had a click
through called Auction Web.

Every once in a while
I would pass his desk

and he would go, "Dee, come over
here, let me show you this."

So he would show me
what he was doing
and of course he explained it as

it was gonna be kind
of a garage sale, flea market,

kind of site. OK, why do we need
that? And so...

And he came to me
and said, "Do you
wanna help grow it?

You know, is it something you
think is a good idea? I'd like
to turn it into a--

into a company possibly.
Would you help me spin it out?"
I just looked at him and said,

"You know, this is the dumbest
idea I've ever heard.

You're gonna get strangers
to trust each other
on the Internet?

Lots of luck. We're
not interested, have fun."

He tried to get
lots of people to join
and nobody would join

'cause they just thought it was
a flea market. I took him down
to an investor conference

in Palm Springs,
so I got 15 people in there
and seven of them left

during his presentation,
because it was a long,
boring presentation.

He had this pony tail
down to his waist. He didn't
look like the kind of guy

who was the CEO of any kind
of company. Some investors said
never do that to me again

because that's flea market,
you could never make a good
brand out of that.

-And that's how eBay
was launched.

We had him in our
midst, and we had no idea.

He was, he was a tech support
engineer and a very quiet guy.
We had no idea.

Meanwhile we are
hearing about, you know,
the partners

need a final version
to put in the ROMS to ship.

Any deferral of schedule
is very politically charged,

so what we decided to do was
just remove the schedule
from that information pack.

Sony was just, you know,
insistent about that, like,
"Where is it? Where is it?"

And there's only so many excuses
you can come up with to try to
put them off to say, you know,

"Just a little bit longer,
just a little bit longer."
They're losing patience.

Hope to deliver that
by December 1st.

Uh, we're still evaluating that,
to see whether we can
meet that date.

And then we started
blowing schedules.

It's... uh,
it's in development right now.

We expect to be delayed
by approximately one quarter.

-What is going on here?
- I've
just gotten a little sick

of all this complaining about
our schedule slips, dammit.
We do a good job here.

We are a little slow sometimes
and we have a lot of bugs,
but so what?

I started to understand
where the cracks
were starting to begin

and where we didn't have a real
message, and a real clear
what we were building,

and what we weren't building,
and for whom, and for how much

was it gonna cost,
and when it was going to ship.

This is kind of the pet
shop where the animals are kept,

and the animals have different
behavior when you pick them up.

When I pick the cat up, it kind
of scrunches up against

the glass and when
I drop him, he tumbles.

These really
creative people, but they would
have these flights of fancy.

I mean, they would just go off
in all kinds of crazy directions

and they were amazing ideas,
but, dudes, we got to ship
a product at the end of the day.

And during that time,
the Newton shipped.

Ladies
and gentleman, Newton is here.

Newton was the product
that was ready to go.

It was all about
new technologies.

The most important thing
that I've ever been involved
with in my entire life.

It's bad enough you
get betrayed by them, but now

they're gonna try to
put you out of business.

There was always
something else to be tuned up,

there was some bug
to be caught,

there was some memory leak
to be plugged up

and the date got later
and later and later.

I'd made commitments.

The company had made
commitments,

and the commitments
were now being undone

by our inability, or maybe
even cultural unwillingness

to let something out the door
that wasn't like perfect.

And I felt the first wave,
that first zap of terror.

We were too dazzled by
what it could possibly do

to kind of realize
we were biting off
more than we could chew.

I was still in creative mode,
working on a flipping coin,

uh, so the game room would
have something in it.

Whereas you tap the coin and it
would flip around heads or tails

and gave you a random number
for feedback and all.

And I was setting a bad example
for the team by doing stuff

that was relatively
frivolous when we needed

to concentrate on the boring,
uh, but necessary parts.

And it really made me
do some soul searching
that I was kind of, uh...

leading people astray
and not having

quite the right, uh,
seriousness of our situation.

The deadline
is everything, meet this date
or miss your opportunity

to change the world.

I don't think we had
anyone saying that.

I was like,
"Huh... OK, I'm not crazy,

I love all the people I work
with, but something
ain't right."

My heroes, these icons,
that I know as people now,

how are they letting
this happen?

Don't they see? Don't--

Aren't they listening?
Kind of like parents, right?

At some point when you grow up,
your parents can do no wrong,

and then they can only do wrong.
It was kind of that same thing.

I grew up as a person,
and these people who I saw

as parents and as educators
started to become

you know, humans as well
in my eye, not just icons.

And that's when it kind
of flipped for me like,
"I can't just follow

the leader anymore. You need
to be a leader yourself."

One night,
Sunday I think, and I walk
into the building and I hear

slam, slam, bang, bang, bang.
No idea what was going on,
no idea.

And just banging away
building what looked
to me like bunk beds.

I said, "Guys, what, what are
you doing here?" They said,
"We're building bunk beds."

Why do you need to build
a bunk bed in your office?
Why don't you go home to sleep?

We had to
go up against it,
pull it together to get

something out the door.
We've got to get serious.

I remember like
sleeping on, you know,
some random

mattress on the floor,
we didn't care about all this,

we didn't care whether
we had furniture or anything,
we were just doing this thing.

So we're just working
all out all the time, uh, and
I-- I was actually sleeping

under my desk sometimes and then
I would get up in the morning
and just start working again.

It's night time,
people are clustered around
a handful of machines.

The rabbits are running around
under their feet, the parrot
is squawking

and shitting all the time.
It smelled horrible.

Uh, it-- it was dank, musty,
you know it smelt of sweat

and exhaustion and no one
wanted to be anywhere else.

We'll have it, we'll have it
tomorrow morning, alright? So--

Every single one of us,
it was all hands on deck,
ship or die.

There was this
constant drum beat of,

"We have to ship, we have
to ship, we have to ship."

In terms of
intensity and pressure
it was the best of times

and it was the worst of times.
In some ways we were never
closer to each other

and we never felt better
about what we were doing,
because we were getting there.

- My fingers?
- Uh-huh. Both hands.

- That'll never work.
- One finger
at the other end.

It's quick, it's--
there's a pleasing pace to it.

- A little better? OK.
- Yeah, much better,
much better.

It's this
incredible experience

of sort of all these different
people working, you know,
like a symphony.

This thing that we
imagined, now has become real.

We've done it,
and now you can see it and
touch it and use it as well.

It's time to ship.
We need to get this out.

It was
one in the morning,
everyone was there,

everyone was exhausted.

It was a classic decision

that every project has
to make like, go or no go.

So here we all were,
in it together and saying like,
"Is this it, are we done?"

Marc Porat said,
"Anyone could speak about
whether we should ship.

Is the software ready?"
And a ton of engineers
said, "We should wait."

Marc listened and he said,
"Our partners have given us
a deadline, we're shipping."

So welcome to the first
public demonstration of-- of
General Magic's technologies.

I wanna talk a little bit
about, um, you know, we worked
really hard the last four years

putting all this stuff together.
Uh, I feel, you know,
emotional about it.

-Uh, people, uh, people--

-What I wanna do is, uh,
is talk about the, uh--

The incredible-- the best part
of working on this the last four
years is not the invention,

I-- I love helping create
this stuff, but the best
part was working

with the incredible team
that we have assembled
at General Magic.

This isn't the work of just me
and Bill, but the work of some
incredibly brilliant,

passionate people that I'm
honored to be able to work with
and I think these guys

these-- We're working
with a bunch of young
programmers in their twenties

that are going to go on to do
things that dwarf anything that
Bill and I have ever done.

They are just incredibly great
and so, without further ado,
with, uh, great pride, uh,

and representing Bill and--
and the amazing team
at General Magic,

here it is world, Magic Cap.

- It's a new
way to reach just about anyone

-...anywhere, anytime.

You're only a press
of a button away.

-Sony Magic Link,
and what it takes off your desk

is only matched,
by what it takes off your mind.

Sony Magic Link Intelligent
Communicator. It clears your
desk, it clears your mind."

Still so very
disturbing when you, when you
work on something for so long

and then you let it out
into the world.
It's like having this baby

and like, have you raised it
well enough? Is it going to be
okay on its own out there?

Uhm, it's a little traumatic,
actually to let something
out like that.

Hey, these really belong to you,
somebody asked me that.
They are yours!

Whatever doubts we had
or whatever disagreements
or anything, we were on.

We were, this was the moment,
this was the launch.

We were gonna make it,
we were gonna succeed
and it was gonna be amazing.

So, what are we doing?
Today we are making
the first steps.

This afternoon it's out there,
the devices are out there
and the service is out there.

We had arranged
to have a demonstration day
at Fry's,

a famous place
for new product introductions.

And a few famous people
from Apple came, just
out of courtesy.

We went into the store and all
of the, all of the demonstration
stuff was way in the back,

behind the refrigerators, you
couldn't see anything. It became
clear that the Fry's staff

had not been trained
on how to demonstrate
the devices, or even knew

what they were or who we were,
or why we were there.

We talked about
our user as being Joe Sixpack.

And I do remember sitting around
thinking, "You know, Joe Sixpack
really doesn't have email."

And if that was our target,
it was very early for--
for Joe Sixpack.

I worried
about the size, I worried
about the battery life,

I worried about the 800 dollars.

I don't even know
which button to push.

No, I don't need that.

- You might need it.
-I don't.

What it really comes down to
is a personal decision

as to whether or not you really
wanna be in touch all the time.

My stomach turned sour
and I thought we're doomed.

No one came, no one
bought it. Nothing.

And so we are
waiting for the sales to happen
and the sales numbers were low.

Very low, and there were some
problems with the AT&T Network.
So bit by bit

we began to get evidence
that this thing wasn't gonna
rocket right,

it was gonna be more difficult,
and that's the reality
that starts to sink in,

is that, this is not
as easy as it seems.

We had sold fewer than 3000
devices, and almost all of those

had been sold
to friends and family
of the company and our partners.

Virtually none
to ordinary consumers.

I was looking at the list
of the names of the buyers

and I recognized all of them,
I knew who they were,
and I thought

that we don't have
a business here,
we are not gonna make it.

Share price, that's
I think, the greatest concern
in this room and that's

what we're going to take on,
head on.

The explosion of the Internet
has forced a rethinking
of strategies

across the entire industry.

I have believed for years,
and continue to believe,

that the notion of taking
intelligent devices with you,

of the scale from this big

to that small
is for real as a market.

I continue to believe
in the wireless dimension,

there will be smart phones,
there will be smart pagers,

and maybe even things
like intelligent watches,
for all we know.

It's a question of resources,
priorities and market readiness,

uh, for us to figure out
where the sweet spot is. We--

- Can we make some
money while this is going on?

This guy from
the San Francisco Chronicle,
I mean, I remember

he just drilled me.
He was like,

"You guys are going
out of business.

Sony is going to drop you.
I have sources that
have told me that.

What is the company's response?

What happens
when Sony drops you?

You guys are dead."

It's like, dude,
you didn't work here
for three and a half years,

pulling all-nighters,
seven days a week.

You didn't see the future
and know what's coming

and, and now it's all
just in ashes around you.

I'm looking
at spreadsheets, in my office

and thinking,
"In a half hour I'm gonna
have to get on the phone

and talk to the analyst from
Goldman Sachs and I don't know
what the hell I'm gonna say.

How do I create the impression
that there is a future here."

Marc did it,
but, uh, I was at a loss.

The initial experience
is terrific,
and where we are headed

is sublime, and to get from
terrific to sublime takes time.

- I don't want
to be negative.
-Why is this tilted?

- It's not titled.
- It's been
a lot of hype.

I would not say that
in the video. Where we are
starting, as exciting as it is,

is not where we are going
to end up. This will take time.

It's a voyage that takes time,
it's a journey that takes time.
This will take time.

It takes time.
You have to be patient.

Perfect,
absolutely perfect.

You know, I just thought
as you were talking

how complicated it is
for you to be figuring out

-what you can and can't say.
-Yeah, it's true.

It's a whole other issue
I wasn't thinking about.

I was torn up, it was...

To walk in, there was a week,
you know, Phil actually
had to set me aside

because I was so distraught,
that there was a week or two
that I actually just took off.

I didn't even show up for work
because I was so distraught.

And then Phil actually had to
sit me down and go, "Tony what's
wrong? You're not you."

Like to go from 80,
120 hours a week to none.

And so for me personally that
was a major rocking event.

Then the next one disappointment
for me is, you know, I started
design devices

and I started to try to mold
General Magic technology

into something
that I thought was sellable.

And so I created basically
a whole product plan,
and technology plan

for what I thought was going
to be a successful product.

I go back to General Magic,
I said, "Look I have
a firmed up product plan,

you need to mold your software
to build this kind of device."
And they just looked at me

and said,
"Sorry, we can't do that.
We have other priorities."

For General Magic, as I saw it,
was, basically the end.

They were defeated.
That was the saddest part
about that meeting,

is that, and Andy in particular
I think was the one who said,

"We're not gonna--
we can't do this. We're not
going to do it," and...

they just didn't--
They didn't have anything left.

I am a particularly loyal
person, so it was, it was

very hard for me
to leave General Magic.

I was fully bought into
what we were doing, uhm,

and I stayed perhaps even longer
than maybe I ought to have,
to try to help

change the direction, uhm,

but it was, it was beyond,
uhm, saving, unfortunately.

It looked like
a massive disaster,

a failure, a catastrophe.

It was a sense of rejection that
penetrated right to your heart

and your gut,
and I-- I just felt sick.

It was, uh,
devastating. For me it was,
it was really devastating

and, uh, I thought immediately,
"I have to take time off.

It's-- it's going to be a long
time before I start committing

to yet another blue sky,
uh, proposition."

The vision that
Marc, Bill and Andy had sold,

not just to the world,
but to us,

that this was a cool, fun,

lovely thing to have,
and that everybody would
want one because we did.

And we were wrong.

I think the conceptual
ideas were there, the user base
was not there,

the technology was not there,
the things to do on it
were not there,

it's like inventing
the television in the 1880's,
you just couldn't.

Like it doesn't
matter if you invented it
because you didn't have shows,

you didn't have capabilities.

I think there was actually
nothing General Magic
could have done

to succeed, because they were
at the wrong time.

The way I think
about that, it's like a wave.
If you start paddling too early

your arms will be tired
by the time the wave arrives,

and the wave will slide right
under you and leave you behind.

That's sort of what happened
with General Magic. They saw
the wave before anyone else,

and they thought it was coming
sooner and they got tired
before it arrived.

Yeah, but they had
all the right talent.

You can become
so focused, and such a believer

in what you are doing
that you can miss the change
of context in an industry.

In this case, the World Wide Web
and General Magic probably
didn't pivot,

uh, fast enough to the post
world after the Web,
but I missed it as well.

I was getting increased
pressure as a CEO of Apple,

by the Apple board, you know,
why was I wasting Apple's
time and money

on these post PC devices and not
just focusing on the Macintosh.

The result? I eventually
got fired by Apple.

I learned from failure how
incredibly painful it can be
when you fail publicly.

It wasn't just
the little failures,
but, you know, I had to fail

in front of the whole world
when I was fired from Apple.

It really hurt me for a long,
long time, and it wasn't

till about 15 years later that
I could actually get my head
around and deal with it.

But the stories of Silicon
Valley are always the stories

of these incredibly
successful companies,

and yet here is a company,
General Magic,

that wasn't
commercially successful
and eventually went bankrupt,

and yet so much of what came out
of General Magic

is the foundation of everything
we take for granted today.

Failure doesn't-- doesn't
stop me as long as it's

on a path towards
something really wonderful.

But with General Magic
there was a certain deflation
in me personally,

where I felt like, uh,
"Will I be able to do this
one more time? I'm not sure."

Because the potential was so
phenomenal and you could see
this is going to happen.

You know that this is going
to happen, and you realize

you're not gonna be the one
that makes it happen.

It's even more comprehensive
than I remembered.

Yeah.

Now that I look at it,
I think, what were we thinking?

We were trying to do all this?

And, you know...

And we thought
we could push the industry,
we could make them do it.

Mm...
Not there, it wasn't there.

I'm old enough now
to know that it's behind me,
you know, it's-- it's, uh--

To create technical revolution

is-- is really a game for people
in their, in their twenties.

The stamina, you're also not
as contaminated by the past.

More than anything else
it makes me feel old.

That, uh, stuff I-- I worked on

or bought, you know, is-- are--
they are now museum pieces.

Yeah, so there is
a General Magic device,
the Sony Magic Link.

Now I have thought
about it a lot, there is
a whole litany of things,

uh, we should have
done differently.

A lot of blunders that I'm
personally responsible for.

It was completely possible
to achieve the most ambitious

of our visions, uh,
but in a staged fashion.

We sometimes
need closure on things
that are not closeable.

A peak experience, positive
or negative happens,
it's not easy to resolve.

In the moment we all do the best
we can do in the moment,
at that moment.

It's in retrospect that you see
what the impact was.

I felt, a profound
feeling of humiliation.

Shame that I had
brought everyone along
with such high anticipation

and then couldn't at the end,
deliver it for them,

and for myself, and for them.

So I remember
coming home one evening,
so the kids were still up.

"Daddy." And daddy had given
it all to perfect strangers.

And my wife said,
"Don't come home like this."

Can you, Marc
slide over to your right,

so you are not
bracketing the plate.

"If you need to sit
in your car, for hours

or for all night,
don't come back.

Don't walk in the door
if you're not a person,
if you're not present,

because, you're not wanted."

And you know in-- in--
it collapsed,

it all came tumbling down,
and the company didn't work,
and my marriage didn't work,

in the same 12 month period,
you know.

And it all fell apart.

Yeah.

Have you
told your children about this?

Well I'm talking to them now,
aren't I?

It's one of the reasons
I agreed to make this film.

Life is ebbs and flows,
when a wave crashes
on the shores

and the rocks hear,
you don't think of
the wave as having failed.

You think of the wave as having
done its thing and the next wave
will come and the next wave,

and that's how I think of
General Magic. A moment in time.

It always amazed me,
because I haven't seen Marc
in many, many years,

you know, why there wasn't
a second act.

Because here is an individual
who was so good,

so exceptional
at what he did well.

Brought together
perhaps the best team

and the reality is,
in my mind Marc never failed,

you know, because he actually
did conceptualize

so many of the products
that we have today.

It was a decade of failure
in Silicon Valley for me.

General Magic was a disaster,
Phillips was a critical success,
but a business disaster.

Then I had my start up and then,
you know, during the start up
times the Internet crunch

happened and I couldn't get
any more funding
and that was a disaster.

So it was a disaster
after disaster
from a business perspective.

But from a personal perspective
it caused me to grow up
each time,

and learn because I was faced
with this real reality

of like, this isn't working
and you better understand
why and learn from it.

Because I had to go through that
to be able to set my--
to set the stage up

for what was to come
in 2001 and beyond.

General Magic gave us
a glimpse of what
the future could be.

The technology unfortunately
wasn't there at the time,

but those dreams,
we kept dreaming.

Tony is very big on music
and he would talk about
music a lot and how,

how someday we were gonna have,
you know, a little device

with all our music on it and I'm
like, "OK, why do I need that?"

I loved music
growing up in Detroit,
and I was always sick

and tired of lugging my
CD's and all this
other stuff around.

I wanted something where
I could take it all the time.

MP3 showed up.
I was like, music is coming.

Next thing I know I get a call,
"We've looked at all the MP3
players, we think they are bad.

We think there is one that can
be done in the Apple way."

And then Steve said,
"Now we need you to come on
the team to put it together."

And then I started calling
all kinds of companies

all around the valley,
around world.
Trying to figure out displays

trying to figure out batteries,
trying to figure out storage

and then Steve was able,
and the team was able
to build on top of those

and make it even better,
and so we were like,
it's happening.

Boom, that's iPod.
I happen to have one right here

in my pocket, as a matter of
fact. There it is, right there.

The Magic lesson
was, we have to ship it
as fast as possible

so you could learn
from the market and you
can iterate quickly.

Every year we made sure we had
a new version of the iPod.

And then we added
downloadable apps,

games, email,
communications, wireless.

We had these different pieces
and I'm like this is starting
to come together.

I remember this,
and it was like I was
back at General Magic

again in a way, because it's
what we talked about,
just 15 years later.

This is real, Steve goes,

"It's taking off, we need
to put it on a cellphone."

Today Apple is
going to reinvent the phone.

And here it is.
This is one device.

This has been, at that point,
17 years in Silicon Valley,

and we were finally able
to realize the dream we had

in 1991 on stage
and Steve Jobs talking about it.

We're going to use the best
pointing device in the world.

We're going to use
a pointing device
that we are all born with,

we're born with ten of them,
we are going to use our fingers.

So, let's go ahead
and turn it on, alrighty.

I was proud to think
that, "Yeah, my god,
we did it."

Tony did it. Everything
we wanted to do, there it is.

and on the other hand,
I was sad that it wasn't us.

But I also felt vindicated
in some way.

That the ideas had been right,
the timing had been wrong.

Steve would often call me
after like the big product
introductions,

just to see what I thought.
4:00 p.m. I was in my office,
I got a call from Steve.

He said, "What do you think,
what do you think?"

And it was like
the worst cell phone
connection I've ever heard.

You know it was all like,
you could hear Steve, say:

So the first thing I ask him,
I said, "Are you talking
on an iPhone?"

He goes, "No, no, no."
But I think he was.

Steve told me on the phone,
he thought a lot about Magic Cap

during the course
of the iPhone development,

and in particular mentioned
the projected keyboard,
he had seen that

and used it with Magic Cap
and that gave him faith

that, that was the right
direction to go.

-Hey Zarko.
-Hi, Andy.

Hi, I'm in the middle of
giving a demo of Magic Cap
for cellphones.

It's really exciting,
it's working great.

-You guys-- You guys
did a great job.
-It's incredible.

Yeah, yeah it's almost like
you are in the next room
or something.

-Yeah, amazing. Bye.
-Yeah, OK.

Had I thought that
it would be done by Steve Jobs,

if I had known that then,
I think I wouldn't have been
as devastated.

Because then I would know
that it would be done
and it would be done right.

It was very gratifying,
because it had come full circle,
you know?

Started with the Mac,
and had spawned General Magic.

General Magic progeny had
spawned iPhone and Android.

I mean, we can't
forget the Android.

Thank you for joining us today.
You know Android

obviously, you know,
being an open source project,

we consider ourselves
the shepherd of it.

So you see the vision continues.

You know, if you look at
Android, Andy Rubin droid,
Andy was right there

with us and then he carried it
to Android and he makes it
to now where we are.

I mean, here's the test,
what if General Magic

never happened,
would we have had Android?

Not a chance, I mean all these
things were linked together,
one after another.

One out of every five
people on the planet uses

an Android phone, uh,
growing every month.

The vision was true,
the vision was accurate,
the vision is the idea

that basically got computing
to the last hurdle.

The last hurdle was
when computing got into

the palm of the hand
of everybody in the world.

And between Tony and--
and Andy, that's about 98%

of the world's smartphones,
is those two guys who sat
15 feet apart.

That's pretty amazing,
and that by itself is--

brings such satisfaction.
It's, uh-- I can't even
describe it.

First obvious thing
to mention is that we are not
alone here today.

We are being filmed
for posterity as part of our--
our introduction video.

Who knows if any of this
will really be in the video.

Imagine a star
that went supernova

and everything
that you touch today,

everything you interact
with today technology wise

is because that star power
touched it.

I mean, all these companies,
and I don't know

if you add up the value
of those what it would be,

but they all had
their genesis with this crew

of just a few dozen people,
who were at General Magic.

It was one
of the only times
I've ever felt like

there's no weak link
in this chain,

everyone on this team,

uh, is brilliant,
is so committed and passionate.

What's so rare is having all
those things at the same time.

When you look at
that class of people

and what the world
looks like today,
that was the training ground

for us, for what has
shaped the world of today.

We all carry things
from General Magic,
in terms of our view

of what could be
possible in the future.

And as engineers
you can't help but think,

"There's-- there's-- Can we
do this now? How about now?"

I am so, so excited to show you
our work, and I'm wearing
Apple Watch right here.

A lot of General Magic was
imagining what the world would
be like if some things existed

that maybe we would make,
and that's so fun to do.

You can control both the eyes
and the mouth to get just

the right expression you would
like to send to somebody.

And that is so true
in so many fields right now,
you are able to actually

transform industries
by your work in technology.

When you look at
someone like Megan taking
all of her knowledge

and all the things she learned,

and now bringing it
to the government and seeing

how the US Government is
transforming through that.

Hello, everybody, how you doing?

-Good to see you,
is this my seat right here ?
-Yes, it is.

President Obama had created
the US Chief Technology
Officer, which is my job

and our team and really said:
"Come and help me using
those new methods

on some of these harder
problems, these problems
that are in our civic space."

There is the future right here.

One of the things
that I like to work on is

how to use technology
to make people's lives better

and sort of harness talent
and unlock talent.

I love thinking about,
uh, how magic is anywhere.

Uh, in everyone,
and how do you pull that out

and really make sure that
the talent that wants to do
its thing is able to do it.

You know,
as the human race thrives
really on this planet

it creates all kinds
of problems, education,
uniting people, climate change.

There is not enough water,
there is not enough food.
What are we going to do?

Those can all be solved
with technologies, it's just
a question how humanity uses it.

But, the reliance on technology
for everything, for human
interactions is worrisome.

Where people are, you know,
you go to anything and everyone
is like this, right.

Um, so I worry about what
happens to society and children

and how they interact
with each other.

You can't change the human race,
yeah, but you can start

to educate them so that they
change their behaviors.

And so the question is, can you
take these powerful tools

and do something that really
does help a lot of people?

Can you inspire a group
of young people now, to really,

to be creative and come up
with these new ideas?

Tonight, we feature an iconic
inventor of iPod and iPhone,

I would like to bring up
five numbers to introduce him.

Seven billion, two hundred
and seventy nine million,

three hundred and ninety five
thousand, eight hundred
and seventy three.

This is the number
of kilowatt hours saved
by Nest Thermostat owners.

Eighteen, the number of
generations of iPod's shipped.

Three hundred, the number
of patents authored.

Three hundred and fifty million,
the number of iPods sold.

Join me in welcoming
the one and only Tony Fadell.

Hi, everybody.

Let's say,
you show up now, you're a kid,
you show up here in the Valley,

um, what would
you tell someone similar
to you who just walked in,

you know, wet behind the ears
in Silicon Valley today?

You know I am only up here
because of many people
in this audience,

who helped me get here,
and that's the magic
of Silicon Valley.

We all started in the same place
you are in today.

Everyone has the same self
doubts and no one's perfect.

And when you meet your heroes
and when you work with them

and they treat you as a peer,
learn from it.

Keep moving. If you're
dreaming the right dream,

you're on the right path.
I've been there before,

it's tough, keep going.

These people helped me
to become the person I am.

How can we take this same idea
of bold dramatic change

to help create a better society?

We are going to have
to invent those things

and do it in all of these other
domains that are being touched
or revolutionized by technology.

It may seem daunting,
it may seem difficult,
it may seem impossible,

but if you just find the right
people and keep seeking out

knowledge and advice
and keep staying open
to make a better world

regardless of where you come
from, great things can happen.

We judge things
by the moment in which we feel

that they have made an impact
on the mass culture.

They are in the anthropology,
they are in the culture
of how we see

ourselves, and how we come
to expect the world to be

and I don't think that will
happen for another ten years.

I think we will build to it
incrementally and every quarter

and every year it will
get closer and closer,

but I don't think it will
be until the 21st century
when the stuff

we are working on today becomes
unexceptional, unexceptional.

Not worth making a video about,
and, and that's the test--

Except for historical
documentary purposes.

And, and that's the test
of, uh, of hey, we've made it.

We've really made a difference.

We've really changed the world.