"I been in the right place but it must have been the wrong time/ I'd have said the right thing but I must have used the wrong line / I been in the right trip but I must have used the wrong car" - Dr John
I was lucky enough recently to be invited to a private screening of this fantastic documentary. Expertly scripted and beautifully shot by co-directors Sarah Kerruish and Matt Maude, the film uses archival footage and contemporary interviews to document the somewhat giddying rise and fall of an early 90s tech start-up, the eponymous General Magic.
I don't want to give away too many spoilers, but here's the short and sweet of it. Spun out of Apple and led by the immensely charismatic Marc Porat (surely the inspiration for Halt and Catch Fire's Joe MacMillan), General Magic brought together a veritable super group of technologists to build what was, to all intents and purposes, the world's first smart-phone. And remember: this is a good 15 years before the iPhone. The team attracted the attention of the great and good of the tech and investment world - and the cash that went with it - then launched a product to almost complete indifference (at one point in the film someone notes that pretty much all of the 4000 customers who bought the device were friends and family of the team). The fall-out was, well, predictable.
Most documentaries - or for that matter feature films - about the tech scene tend to fall into one of two categories. The first follows a company through its travails and on to its apparently inevitable success. The second is some kind of exposé of tech's "dark side". Both have their place, I guess, but this was something else: a funny, genuinely exciting and often very moving, first-hand account of a company that apparently had the world (and certainly Wall Street) at its fingertips, created a potentially world-changing bit of tech, and crashed and burned almost on launch. And yet there is a phoenix side to the story: many of the key players went on to change the world - not least in some cases by working on said iPhone.
One of the most telling things to come out of the documentary for me was the degree to which the team simply missed the advent of the internet - or more accurately the web. One of the problems with hindsight is that it leads to a kind of tech determinism, that such-and-such was always inevitable. But when you're in the thick of it, it's easy to miss something whose manifest success is potentially years out and not at all clear at the time.
On the way home I kept thinking about The Yardbirds. Relatively unknown now, the Yardbirds were an easy 60s British blues boom group that had only a modicum of success, yet spawned the careers of three of rock music's most influential guitarists - Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton and the greatest of them all (imho), Jeff Beck. Who saw that coming? And whoever does?
Honestly, anyone interested in the rise of tech and its intimate relationship with venture capital should see this fantastic film.
I was lucky enough recently to be invited to a private screening of this fantastic documentary. Expertly scripted and beautifully shot by co-directors Sarah Kerruish and Matt Maude, the film uses archival footage and contemporary interviews to document the somewhat giddying rise and fall of an early 90s tech start-up, the eponymous General Magic.
I don't want to give away too many spoilers, but here's the short and sweet of it. Spun out of Apple and led by the immensely charismatic Marc Porat (surely the inspiration for Halt and Catch Fire's Joe MacMillan), General Magic brought together a veritable super group of technologists to build what was, to all intents and purposes, the world's first smart-phone. And remember: this is a good 15 years before the iPhone. The team attracted the attention of the great and good of the tech and investment world - and the cash that went with it - then launched a product to almost complete indifference (at one point in the film someone notes that pretty much all of the 4000 customers who bought the device were friends and family of the team). The fall-out was, well, predictable.
Most documentaries - or for that matter feature films - about the tech scene tend to fall into one of two categories. The first follows a company through its travails and on to its apparently inevitable success. The second is some kind of exposé of tech's "dark side". Both have their place, I guess, but this was something else: a funny, genuinely exciting and often very moving, first-hand account of a company that apparently had the world (and certainly Wall Street) at its fingertips, created a potentially world-changing bit of tech, and crashed and burned almost on launch. And yet there is a phoenix side to the story: many of the key players went on to change the world - not least in some cases by working on said iPhone.
One of the most telling things to come out of the documentary for me was the degree to which the team simply missed the advent of the internet - or more accurately the web. One of the problems with hindsight is that it leads to a kind of tech determinism, that such-and-such was always inevitable. But when you're in the thick of it, it's easy to miss something whose manifest success is potentially years out and not at all clear at the time.
On the way home I kept thinking about The Yardbirds. Relatively unknown now, the Yardbirds were an easy 60s British blues boom group that had only a modicum of success, yet spawned the careers of three of rock music's most influential guitarists - Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton and the greatest of them all (imho), Jeff Beck. Who saw that coming? And whoever does?
Honestly, anyone interested in the rise of tech and its intimate relationship with venture capital should see this fantastic film.