Careless People has been a much-discussed book in the circles that I am involved in. In the book, Wynn Williams outlines her career at Facebook / Meta in what was at the time a nascent public policy team. The term careless people is a highly appropriate reference to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.
While I was reading Careless People, The Great Gatsby was having a moment. It was the 100th anniversary of The Great Gatsby’s publication, and the ‘careless people’ quote was considered apropos for the times we are living in, in particular the Trump administration’s actions.
“They were careless people… they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
Anyway, back to Careless People, Wynn Williams outlines her experience from pitching to Facebook for a role that didn’t exist but was needed, through to navigating the global growth Facebook was undertaking at the time. The challenges that Wynn Williams faces can be broadly broken down into four areas (with specific allegations):
Poor management judgement (lying to Congress and providing assistance to authoritarian regimes)
What’s interesting about the book depends on the reader. Much of the experience was relatable to my own earlier experience at Yahoo! The long days, changing priorities, travel (which was much more of a thing pre-COVID), office politics and fiefdoms, the constant unintended consequences of inventing the future. Secondly, the Facebook management have bought into what Barbrook and Cameron termed The Californian Ideology in their 1995 essay of the same name.
“…the Californian Ideology promiscuously combines the free-wheeling spirit of the hippies and the entrepreneurial zeal of the yuppies. This amalgamation of opposites has been achieved through a profound faith in the emancipatory potential of the new information technologies.”
However, I feel fortunate to have worked with a mature leadership who knew what they didn’t know and realised that they lived in a global village. But that might be down to the fact that Yahoo! by the time I had got there had a fair share of ups and downs.
Careless People reminded me a lot of Barbarians Led by Bill Gates, written by Jennifer Edstrom and Martin Eller. Although they are separated by some 25 years between each being written. Both books tell the story of an imperfect organisation scaling to an opportunity— I have written about Barbarians here. Wynn Williams is the better storyteller, providing a coherent and engaging path through the narrative.
I can recommend Careless People as a good book to read, I finished it off over a bank holiday weekend whilst nursing a sprained ankle. For people in advertising and marketing it won’t be that surprising, it confirms many things that were ‘common knowledge’ in the industry. For the general public, it will be shocking given the facts that the author marshals together.
Would I have thought reading Accidental Empires or Barbarians Led by Bill Gates in the late 1990s that Bill Gates would have transformed from the soulless ‘borg leader’ portrayed to the voice of relative reason he is today? Probably not, there might be hope for Zuckerberg at least out of the cast of characters in the book.
Wynn Williams is now exploring the edges of policy and artificial intelligence and is likely someone worth keeping an eye on.
Welcome to my August 2024 newsletter, this newsletter marks my 13th issue. When I lived in Hong Kong; four was the unluckiest number. 13 featured in confucian beliefs and in tai chi. In western culture 13 has a similar reputation. The status of 13 goes all the way back to Babylonian times. A baker’s dozen contained 13 items; rather than the usual 12 items.
This time last year, I had a daft idea to put together stuff I’ve written, read, been inspired by or have watched that I thought some people might find of interest. Along the way, I shared my Ma’s recipe for a traditional Irish Hallowe’en dish, book recommendations, articles, a review of 2023 and much more.
I spent a good deal of August outside London to recharge and take care of family business. I am now back and getting ready for September.
New reader?
If this is the first newsletter, welcome! You can find my regular writings here and more about me here.
Things I’ve written.
My cousin selling the ‘ancestral’ family farm back in Ireland, got me thinking about roots.
I explored Rob Henderson’s concept of ‘luxury beliefs‘ and other things that I found of interest from around the web.
I looked at some of the themes that have emerged around generative AI in the first half of this year.
Books that I have read.
The Ribbon Queen – I am a huge fan of Garth Ennis as a graphic novel writer and the publication of The Ribbon Queen was the second best news I had received this year since Ennis announced his return to The Punisher series at the beginning of 2024. With The Ribbon Queen Ennis returns obliquely to religion with a tale that sits somewhere between a police procedural and Lovecroftian fiction. Nothing is simple with Ennis and the work touches on themes like police brutality, woke culture, sex trafficking, domestic violence and ancient beliefs.
Part of my love reading comes from my Dad’s library of crime and espionage books. I started reading John LeCarré, Hammond Innes and Alistair Maclean in primary school. Secondary school had me reading Gerald Seymour and Robert Ludlum. Seymour’s work felt more grounded and Harry’s Game during The Troubles felt especially pertinent. Despite being 82 years old Seymour still writes. I haven’t picked up a Seymour novel in decades until I got to read In For The Kill. its the third book in a franchise of Jonas Merrick – a soon-to-retire spook with a love of caravanning and frugality. As a holiday read, I really enjoyed it.
Richard Stark’s Parker is an anti-hero beloved of Hollywood who has appeared in film over years. Richard Stark’s Parker: The Complete Collection is a collection of graphic novel adaptions of The Score, The Outfit, The Score, and Slayground, The Man with the Getaway Face and The Seventh. Stark’s Parker is written with crisp lean copy to match the no-nonsense dark ruthless character. He is at end of America’s hard boiled noir literature like Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett. But Richard Stark’s hero was an armed robber, not a detective. As a genre it was later revived by James Ellroy’s works from the late 1980s on. While Parker has been played on screen by a variety of actors including Lee Marvin and Mark Wahlberg – he is not a character for our times. Darwyn Cooke’s adaption of Parker to a graphic novel format is a 500+ page love letter to mid-century graphic design including vintage newspapers and petrol station maps. It’s a coffee table book that you actually want to read.
Qiu Xiaolong is an American crime writer, who is famous for his character Chief Inspector Chen. In his book Becoming Inspector Chen, was recommended by my friend Ian. The book feels autobiographical in nature. Like Chen, Qiu had studies TS Elliot at university, both had lived through the opening up of China post-Cultural Revolution. Their paths divert when Qiu moved to study in the US and decided to stay there after the ‘June the 4th incident‘. Qiu describes the complex relationships in families due to the Cultural Revolution and the nature of change in China during its opening up phase. The book is an implicit critique of the current Xi administration, as yet again Chen faces the imminent impact of the party machine.
Kara Swisher is a long-time journalist who chronicled Silicon Valley from the dot.com boom onward. In Burn Book Swisher gives us her potted history and hot takes on the people and companies that she tried to report on. I say tried because technology firms have made life difficult for journalists since blogging became a thing and they could go direct to the audience. Swisher came from an unhappy but privileged background and jumped into journalism with gusto. There isn’t anything that surprising in her reporting save how was it so late that Swisher really dialled into how toxic and nihilistic some of her subjects really were? Swisher’s book is more engaging than Fred Vogelstein’s Dogfight, but lacks the wit and panache of Michael Malone’s books or Robert X Cringely’s Accidental Empires.
A bit of aside to the books, I found this article by Dazed Digital quite interesting. Apparently, straight men are much less likely to read novels. I read a mix of fiction and non-fiction as you can probably tell if you are regular reader. If you want fiction recommendations as a start, I have some in an old post I wrote about 50 books I would recommend (scroll down to fiction).
Things I have been inspired by.
Quantum advertising.
Faris Yakob had dropped a banger of an opinion piece on WARC. In quantum advertising Yakob calls out marketing management for optimising to the wrong things and believing that creativity is predictable.
Gartner the research house most famous for its technology reports has taken an in-depth look at return-to-office mandates beloved of large enterprises such as Apple, Amazon or Boeing and Jacob Rees-Mogg. Gartner looked at employee research and HR leaders as part of an up to date research done in May 2024. Any small gains in discretionary effort and employee engagement are wiped out by drops in intent to stay, with the implied disruption and cost cause by employee churn.
Zoë Mann started an initiative that would get some of the newer strategist voices heard.
Things I have watched.
I haven’t watched A Clockwork Orange for a while and revisited it. I am still amazed by the way Kubrick used lighting, Beethoven and the Wendy Carlos soundtrack to such good effect. It also felt much more creative and transgressive than anything one would see at the cinema now. The modernist and brutalist architecture gives it an otherworldly quality now.
I wanted to watch Weathering With You since it came out. I finally got to watch it. The animation is almost as rich as Studio Ghibli and the plot has some fantastical elements of it as well. But the story is grounded in the darker side of Tokyo.
The protagonist is homeless and lives in a net café near the Kabukicho gate that marks the entry to the red light district that is part of Shinjuku ward. In this respect the anime provides a realistic portrayal of a ‘freeter’ – an under-employed young person.
Whatfont is a Google Chrome browser plugin, Safari browser extension and bookmarklet (I use the bookmarklet) that tells you what font’s are on a given web page.
Google Analytics health check
Yes I know GA4 is hateful, but Fresh Egg have put together a template to make a data health check easier to do. Give them your details and download their GA 4 Health Check for free.
Decrapifying LinkedIn
At last a compelling use case for the Arc Browser: as a LinkedIn client. Luddite LinkedIn is a ‘boost’ (think plug-in) cleans out things like AI powered elements of the LinkedIn experience.
Better Reddit and YouTube search
GigaBrain provides an alternative to the broken experience searching on Reddit and YouTube. It’s available via webpage and a Google Chrome browser plugin.
The sales pitch.
I am now taking bookings for strategic engagements, I am available for much of September. Contact me here. I am also open to discussions on permanent roles.
Ok this is the end of my August 2024 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other and onward into September and the balmy days of an Indian summer!
Welcome to my July 2024 newsletter, this newsletter which marks my 12th issue. I hope the wettest part of the summer is behind me. This time last year, I didn’t set out to get to 12 issues. I thought I would try three and see where I got to. You’d think I would have had it nailed down by now, but it’s still evolving, finding its voice in an organic process. Getting to this point felt significant, I think it’s down to the weight of the number 12.
12 as a number is loaded with symbolism. The Chinese had a 12 year cycle that they called the ‘earthly branches’ and were matched up with an animal of the Chinese zodiac.
Odin had 12 sons, the Hittites had 12 gods of the underworld. Mount Olympus was home to 12 gods who had vanquished the 12 titans. Lictors who were civil servants assisting magistrates with duties carried a bundle of 12 rods to signify imperial power. The Greeks gave us 12 member juries and both western and Islamic zodiacs have 12 signs.
New reader?
If this is the first newsletter, welcome! You can find my regular writings here and more about me here.
Things I’ve written.
Warped media constructs – what marketers and their advisers think about media channels versus what works and what should be measured.
I contributed to the Rambull newsletter with a selection of my favourite places in London.
End of culture – I disagree with some of what Pip Bingemann said about culture and advertising, but he made some interesting discussion points that I went through and annotated or knocked down.
A bit about the Zynternet phenomenon and interesting things from around the web.
Dogfight – Silicon Valley based journalist Fred Vogelstein was writing for publications like Wired and Fortune at the time Apple launched the iPhone and Google launched Android. He had a front-row seat to the rivalry between the two brands. The book is undemanding to read but doesn’t give insight in the way that other works likeInsanely Great, Where Wizards Stay Up Late and Accidental Empires did. Part of this might be down to the highly orchestrated public relations campaigns happening at the time. (Vogelstein wrote about his experiences with Microsoft’s PR machine for Wired back in 2007). Instead Vogelstein documents developments that I had largely forgotten about like music labels launching albums as multimedia apps on the new iPhone ecosystem. It’s a workman-like if uninspiring document.
This Time No Mistakes by Will Hutton seemed to be a must-read document in the face of an imminent Labour party victory in the general election. Hutton’s The State We’re In was the defining work of wonkish thinking around policy as Labour came into power under Tony Blair in 1997. Three decades later and Labour is poised to rule again during a time of more social issues and lower economic performance. The people are poor and the economy has been barely growing for over a decade. The State We’re In was a positive roadmap of introducing long-term investment culture into British business and upgrading vocational education. This Time No Mistakes is an angrier manifesto of wider change from media and healthcare to government involvement in business. Both books outlined a multi-term roadmap for politicians. In the end, Labour didn’t deliver on The State We’re In‘s vision; this time they are even less likely to do so.
Dark Wire – Joseph Cox was one of the journalists whose work I followed on Vice News. He specialises in information security related journalism and turns out the kind of features that would have been a cover story on Wired magazine back in the day. With the implosion of Vice Media, he now writes for his own publication: 404 Media. Dark Wire follows the story of four encrypted messaging platforms, with the main focus being on Anon. Anon is a digital cuckoo’s egg. An encrypted messaging service designed for criminals, ran as an arms length front company for the FBI. Cox tells the complex story in a taunt in-depth account that brings it all to life. But the story isn’t all happy endings and it does question the threats posed to services like Signal and WhatsApp if law enforcement see criminals moving there.
I went back and revisited Media Virus by Douglas Rushkoff. Once a touchstone of public intellectuals and media wonks, it’s rather different than I remember it from the first reading I had of it at the start of my agency career. More of my thoughts on subjects covered in the book from authoritarian regimes to patient-centric medicine here.
Not a book, but really enjoying Yaling Jiang’s newsletter Following the Yuan that looks at a mix of consumer marketing stories in China with a balanced and analytical approach. Social listening platform YouScan have an interesting insights newsletter, where you can subscribe to here.
Things I have been inspired by.
Lean web design.
I have been keen on lean web design, especially has web page sizes have ballooned over the past decade with little benefit in functionality. However Wholegrain Digital have taken this idea in a new direction by looking at a websites typical carbon footprint. Mine came out better than 97 percent of websites they’d tested so far.
Crushing conformity with creativity
Samira Brophy of IPSOS and Tati Lindenberg of Unilever were at Cannes and talked through some of the dirt is good campaigns and how Unilever switched plot lines in an inventive manner to make better campaigns that fit in with Unilever’s socially forward orientation.
The Arsenal example that they show is a really nice twist on girl plays soccer, kit gets cleaned trope and captures the essence of fandom.
The Future Health Index.
Philips the former consumer electronics pioneer have surveyed healthcare leaders around the world to see what their concerns are and where they may be looking to invest in the future. It’s an interesting read. When I have worked on health clients in the past, we’ve usually focused on what the relevant prescribing healthcare professional thoughts and any patient insights we could glean.
There was a big focus on automation (AI was a particular focus for respondents in countries with distinct healthcare challenges. However the respondents caveated the move to automation with this bit of wisdom:
Automation can help relieve staff shortages, if used right
The Future Health Index 2024 – Philips
Given the old heuristic of about 70 percent of IT projects not meeting the goals set for them, one can understand why there is a degrees of healthy skepticism in leaders and the staff who work with them.
Remote monitoring was one of the most popular areas for healthcare leaders wanting to use clinical decision support software (powered by AI). Curiously, preventative care ranked much lower.
Finally, there was some good news for pharmaceutical companies, negotiating lower prices for drugs was pretty low down on the list for the way leaders thought that they could make financial savings. Though this was tempered in a greater interest in ‘value-based billing’.
State of the (online) union.
From the late 1990s onwards, Mary Meeker’s snapshot of the technology sector was a must read presentation. Meeker came to mainstream fame leading the Netscape IPO while at Morgan Stanley. Early the same year she published The Internet Report – which launched a thousand agency slide decks and was a reference for the investment community during the dot com boom.
The themes of Meeker’s reports over the years followed the development of online:
E-commerce
Mobile internet
Online advertising and search
Rise of Chinese internet companies
Meeker left investment banking to join VC Kleiner Perkins and eight years later set up her own venture capital firm. During COVID-19 Meeker’s internet report wasn’t published for the first time since 1995.
Now it’s returned, you can find the latest issue here. In the meantime, while Meeker took an AI-focused approach to her latest report LUMA Partners have looked at the advertising technology ecosystem in more detail. You can find their comprehensive report here. An honorary mention to Benedict Evans’ annual presentation as well that is even more theme based in style.
Marvel x NHS blood donation
Disney’s partnership with NHS opens up access to a wider potential donor base.
Things I have watched.
Dark Hearts (Newen)
I don’t watch BBC iPlayer all that much, but occasionally I do find some ‘gold’. Dark Hearts (or Cœurs noirs literally Black Hearts) is a French series about a team looking for terrorist weapons, terrorist schemes and French ISIS members in Iraq circa 2016. It’s got the kind of gritty tense feel of SEAL Team or Zero Dark Thirty.
Chronos is a short film very much in the vein of Koyaanisqatsi. In Chronos the director tries to journey through thousands of years in history through the medium of timelapse photography. It’s a beautiful piece of film, but looks very ‘everyday’ now due to the time-lapse functions provided in our smartphones and generative AI services. Film-maker Ron Fricke had to build his own cameras to shoot the footage.
Hong Kong cinema is in a bit of a weird place at the moment. Its most bankable stars are in their 50s and early 60s – though they are holding off aging well. Cantonese culture in general is being squeezed out by mainland media, as well as the rise of Korean and Thai cinema. The current national security laws mean that previous bestsellers like Infernal Affairs or Election can no longer be made in the territory and even a retrospective showing of them could be in a legal grey area. The Goldfinger gets around this by going back to Hong Kong’s go-go era of the 1970s and 1980s and draws on the story of the Carrian Group which went belly up in the midst of a corruption and fraud scandal saw a bank auditor killed and buried in a banana tree grove. Lawyer John Wimbush was found dead in his home swimming pool. A nylon rope around his neck tethered to a concrete manhole cover at the bottom of the pool. So The Goldfinger has a rich vein of material to mine. The Goldfinger starts off during the Hong Kong police mutiny against the ICAC. it follows the rise of Tony Leung as Henry Ching Yat-yin (presumably to avoid legal trouble with George Tan founder of the Carrian Group, who only died during COVID). Ching then has a cat-and-mouse chase with Andy Lau’s Lau Kai-yuen, an inspector of the ICAC. I enjoyed The Goldfinger immensely, CGI and green screen was used to fill in for old Hong Kong which is substantially changed over the decades since. The ‘gweilo’ in the film were over-acted which was distracting, but the Hong Kong talent was top drawer. The more fantastical aspects of it reminded me a bit of Paul Schrader’s Mishima biopic.
The Great Silence is one of the greats of the spaghetti western genre. It was shot in a ski resort in the Dolomites and in a studio of fake snow. That alone would have made it highly unusual. The film was directed by Sergio Corbucci who was more famous for Django. Eureka’s Masters of Cinema have done a fantastic job of putting together a great print and commentary from experts including Alex Cox. It’s probably the best role that Klaus Kinski played in his considerable film career. Even though it’s a western, the underlying politics of the film make it surprisingly contemporary. That’s as much as I can say without giving the plot away.
Useful tools.
Better Reddit search
Google search has become much more limited in its capability for a number of reasons. Giga uses Reddit posts as its source material for search results. It can be useful in research, beyond trying to trawl Reddit using Google advanced search.
Mood board research
Historically, I have been a big fan of Flickr’s image search because of its ‘interestingness’ feature. Same Energy is a tool that matches the vibe of an image that you submit with other images.
Manifestos
A great collection of manifestos and tools to help manifesto writing for brand planners.
The sales pitch.
I am now taking bookings for strategic engagements or discussions on permanent roles. Contact me here.
The story Dogfight tells feels much more recent than it now is almost two decades on, and yet so far away as smartphones are central to our lives. Back in the mid and late 2000s Silicon Valley based journalist Fred Vogelstein was writing for publications like Wired and Fortune at the time Apple launched the iPhone and Google launched Android. He had a front-row seat to the rivalry between the two brands.
And being on the ground in Silicon Valley would have meant that he would have had access to scuttlebutt given in confidence of anonymity as well as official media access.
But he’s probably best known for being part of the story itself: Fred Vogelstein wrote about his experiences with Microsoft’s PR machine for Wired back in 2007.
The fight
The Motorola ROKR E1 I was given, but eventually threw out.
Dogfight starts some time after Apple had withdrawn support for Motorola’s ROKR phone, which was able to sync with iTunes for music downloads. This particular track of Apple’s history isn’t really documented in Dogfight.
The book goes through two separate but entangled story strands. The first is Apple’s development of the Apple iPhone and iPad. At that time Apple in the space of a decade had gone from almost going under, to having the iPod and iTunes music store, together with a resuscitated computer range thanks to the iMac and Mac OS X.
The Google of this era was at its peak, search had become a monopoly and the company was overflowing with wondrous and useful web services from Google Earth to Google Reader. What was less apparent was that inside Google was chaos due to internal politics and massive expansion. Into this walked Andy Rubin who had built and designed the Danger Hiptop, sold exclusively on T-Mobile as the Sidekick.
The Sidekick had been a text optimised mobile device. It featured email, instant messaging and SMS text messages. His new company Android had been acquired by Google to build a new type of smartphone that would continue to provide a mobile audience for Google services.
Dogfight’s style
Dogfight is undemanding to read but doesn’t give insight in the way that other works likeInsanely Great, Where Wizards Stay Up Late and Accidental Empires did. Part of this might be down to the highly orchestrated public relations campaigns happening at the time.
Instead Vogelstein documents developments, from video recordings, marketing materials and court documents. Some of the things covered were items that I had largely forgotten about like music labels launching albums as multimedia apps on the new iPhone ecosystem. This was doing in software with what the Claudia Schiffer Palm Vx or the U2 autograph edition iPod had previously done in hardware.
Google’s decision to ‘acquihire’ the Android team to build their mobile operating system, wasn’t examined in depth. Yet there are clear parallels with the Boca Raton team in IBM which came up with the IBM PC a quarter of a century earlier. Vogelstein kept to the facts.
It’s a workman-like if uninspiring document. And that mattered deeply to me. Part of the reason why I went into agency life was because I was inspired about the possibility of working the technology sector. This inspiration had been fired up by the chutzpah and pioneering spirit portrayed in older technology of history books. Some of them were flawed characters, but all of them had an energy and vibrancy to make the world a better place.
Wired magazine issues had a similar effect. Yet in Dogfight Vogelstein brought neither of those influences to the table, instead he was writing an account that will probably only read by academics citing his material as a contemporary account in a future thesis.
Dogfight isn’t the Liar’s Poker of the smartphone world, it isn’t even that illuminating about the nature of Silicon Valley.
This is probably why Vogelstein hasn’t had a book published since Dogfight – he’s a reporter, not a writer. You can find more book reviews here.
General Magic has a reputation of being the technology equivalent of the Jordan-era Chicago Bulls, but it ended up going nowhere. I never got to see the device in person, it was only available in Japan and the US. It’s as famous much for its alumni, as it is for its commercial failure.
This is captured in a documentary of the same name. For students of Silicon Valley history and Apple fan boys – the team at General Magic sounds like a who’s who of the great and the good in software development and engineering.
General Magic started within Apple with a brief that sounds eerily like what I would have expected for the iPhone decades later.
“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’s not being used… Once you use it you won’t be able to live without it.”
Sullivan M. (July 26, 2018) “General Magic” captures the legendary Apple offshoot that foresaw the mobile revolution. (United States) Fast Company magazine
The opening sequence tells you what the documentary is going to lay out. Over carefully curate images of Silicon Valley campuses, Segway riders and the cute bug like Google autonomous vehicle a voice talks about success and failure. That failure is part of the process of development. That General Magic has a legendary status due to its status as precursor to our always-on modern world and while the company failed, the ideas didn’t.
The genesis of the spirit of General Magic goes back to the development and launch of the Macintosh with its vision of making computers accessible. The team looked around the next thing that would have a similar vision and impact of a product. The Mac had got some of these developers on the front cover of Rolling Stone – they were literally rockstars.
You get a tale of dedication and excitement that revolved around a pied piper type project lead Marc Porat, who managed to come to the table with a pretty complete vision and concept of where General Magic (and the world) would be heading. The archive of footage of the offices with its cool early to mid 1990s Apple Office products still amazes now. The look of the people in the archive footage, make my Yahoo! colleagues a decade later seem corporate and uptight by comparison.
Veteran journalist Kara Swisher said that she started following the company because it was ‘the start of mobile computing, this is where it leads’.
What sets the documentary apart is that it tapped into footage shot by film maker David Hoffman who was hired to capture the product development process. The protagonists then provide a voice over of their younger selves. Their idealism reaches back to the spirit of the 1960s. You can see how touch screen screens and the skeuomorphic metaphors were created and even animate emoticons.
I’ve never known a development process with so much documentary footage. Having been in this process on the inside, the General Magic documentary portrays a process and dynamics that haven’t changed that much.
The ecosystem that the startup assembled including AT&T, Apple, Motorola and Sony made sense given the ecosystem and power that Microsoft had behind it. It’s hard to explain how dominant and aggressive Microsoft was in the technology space. Newton came out as a complete betrayal and John Sculley, who is interviewed in the documentary comes across worse than he would have liked.
The documentary also has access to the 1994 promotional film where General Magic publicly discussed the concept of ‘The Cloud’ i.e. the modern web infrastructure – but the documentary doesn’t dwell on this provable claim.
Goldman Sachs was a key enabler, the idea of the concept IPO set the precedent for Netscape, Uber, WeWork and the 2020s SPAC fever.
In a time when there is barely one thing changing the technology environment, General Magic were pursuing their walled garden of their private cloud and missed the web for a while. Part of this is down to their relationship with AT&T.
The documentary covers how project management dogged the project. Part of the problem was perfectionism was winning over the art of the possible and not focusing on the critical items that needed to be done. The panic of having to ship.
It’s about getting the balance between ‘move fast and break things’ versus crafting a jewel of a product.
But shipping wasn’t enough, the execution of shopper marketing and sales training was a disaster. The defeat was hard given the grand vision. But the ultimate lesson is that YOU are not representative of the mainstream market.
The documentary post-mortem featuring thinkers like Kara Swisher and Paul Saffo points out the lack of supporting infrastructure, that would take years to catch up to where General Magic’s Magic Link had gone. Paul Saffo uses a surfing analogy that I had previously read in Bob Cringely’s Accidental Empires about catching the right wave at the right time.
John Sculley over at Apple made similar mistakes to the General Magic team which resulted in him being fired from Apple. Sculley makes the very human admission that being fired from Apple took him about 15 years to recover from personally.
IBM Simon
The documentary gives a lot of the credit (maybe too much of it) to General Magic as the progenitor of what we now think of as smartphones. The reality as with other inventions is that innovation has its time and several possible ‘inventors’; or what author Kevin Kelly would call ‘the technium’. This is the idea that technological progression is inevitable and that it stands on the layers of what has gone before, like fossils found inside rocks several foot deep. For instance, IBM created a device called Simon which was ‘smartphone’ which sold about 50,000 units to BellSouth customers in the six months it was on the market. Motorola – who were a General Magic partner also launched a smartphone version of the Apple Newton called the Motorola Marco in January 1995 and there are more devices around the same time.
Reality is messy and certainly not like the clean direct line that the General Magic documentary portrays, even the Newton was only part of the story.
The Wonder Years
I was thinking about what I liked so much about the General Magic documentary. I immediately thought about it reminding me of my falling in love with the nascent internet and technology, which then bought me to the start of my agency career working with Palm (the company that eventually helped kill off General Magic’s product ambitions) and the Franklin REX which came out of sychronisation pioneers Starfish Software.
But it was deeper than that. The Silicon Valley portrayed in the General Magic documentary wasn’t the dystopian hellscape of platform firms, generation rent, toxic tech bro culture and ‘churn and burn’ HR culture. Instead the General Magic documentary story represented a halcyon past of Silicon Valley portrayed in books like Where Wizards Stay Up Late, Fire In The Valley and Insanely Great. Where talented people motivated by a fantastic vision thing, with a user centred mission worked miracles. The darkness of fatigue and god knows what else is largely hidden by a Wonder Years TV show feel good nostalgia. Maybe it gives us hope again in the tech sector, despite Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook and Elon Musk? Maybe that hope might inspire something great again?
Marc Porat’s personal tragedy and Tony Fadell’s business failure brings a hint of the real world through the door. The documentary uses Fadell’s link with the iPod and iPhone as a point of redemption, resilience, perseverance and vindication for General Magic.
There’s also a cautionary tale full of lessons learned for new entrepreneurs, who often get the vision thing but forget about the details. More on General Magic here.
