General Magic

Was interested in subject matter, but background music was almost always playing over the voices.

First off, I watched this on Showtime and the sound was perfect.

If you care about Silicon Valley history or are just an Apple fan, this is a must see.

An excellent film that tells the rare story of the most consequential company to fail... but which was not really a failure, because the people and ideas, fueled technologies and devices that changed the world.

If you listen very closely you can hear people speaking. This has got to be the most stressful documentary I've ever watched. Even with headphones on I can barely make out around 90% of what people are saying..

Tech/SV tends to glorify successes. It was nice to watch the deconstruction of how General Magic was created and then failed.

Especially interesting were all the interviews with Tony Fadell (founder of NEST), Marc Porat (CEO of General Magic) and their perspective on how the company imploded.

Also, how did they get a hold off all that old footage??

I watched this at home on DVD from my public library. I see that a number of reviews here complain about the sound mix, I want to state that there is absolutely NO sound problem with the version that is on DVD. This is an excellent documentary, a glimpse into Silicon Valley innovation and what can determine if a company succeeds.

I am a technical guy and worked in a technical career. As I watched this story unfold it brought to mind the first two rules of a group technique called 'brainstorming.' First you generate lots and lots of ideas without regard for whether they are practical or implementable. That unbridled synergism of ideas can be very creative. Second, at some point you switch to the evaluation mode, selecting the subset of really good ideas that can be implemented given time, technology available, budget, and market factors.

The early 1990s Silicon Valley company called General Magic, an Apple spinoff, was really good at the first but mostly neglected the second. They forged ahead with what they envisioned, ignored the advent of the worldwide web, and didn't verify that consumers really wanted what they were inventing, a personal device that replaced a computer, a fax machine, a telephone, and who knows what else.

So they ultimately failed and went bankrupt , partly because their parent Apple used their ideas to forge ahead and create something that came online sooner. But more so because their product was not properly targeted. Yet the ideas they generated, the projects that former General Magic technologists undertook, have changed our world in 25 short years in ways we could not have imagine. Had it not been for General Magic our ways of communication and social media, for good or bad, would not be as it is today and we would not have had devices like Iphones and Ipods.

So, while they failed as a company, their ideas have gone on to big successes.