General Magic Shows its Bag of Tricks

For the last three years, General Magic has been one of the most intriguing high-tech start-ups in Silicon Valley and also perhaps the most secretive, carefully guarding their development effort and industry partners from prying outsiders. This was all the more frustrating because of the reputation of the founding team, Marc Porat, Bill Atkinson, and Andy Hertzfeld — particularly Atkinson and Hertzfeld, who were instrumental in the design of the Macintosh. Whatever these people were up to, one had to assume that it was going to be at least very interesting, if not revolutionary.

On February 8th, General Magic finally showed its hand, holding a public announcement in New York City to introduce its corporate partners along with its vision of personal intelligent communications. The purpose of the announcement was not to introduce any products or availability dates (which Porat promised to reveal by this summer), but instead to detail their vision and plans to develop intelligent communications.

General Magic decided that now was the time to increase the number of developers and potential customers, while at the same time getting early feedback on the direction of the new technologies.

Personal Intelligent Communications

General Magic traces its roots back to projects code-named Paradigm and Pocket Crystal within Apple. The goal of the project, led by Marc Porat, was to create technologies enabling people to use personal intelligent communications to overcome the complexities of our increasingly information-rich lives. Realizing that such a goal required broad industry participation, Apple’s Chairman and CEO John Sculley concluded that General Magic should be an independent corporation. General Magic was then incorporated on May 1, 1990.

Alliance Includes Big Players

General Magic quickly moved to create an “alliance” of leading-edge computing, communications, and consumer electronics companies to become investors, supporters, and most importantly, licensees of its new technology. Over the course of the following three years, General Magic recruited the personal communicator’s “dream team” including (in order of joining) Apple, Sony, Motorola, AT&T, Philips, and Matsushita.

Telescript

The technologies that attracted the likes of Sony and AT&T are known as Telescript and Magic Cap. Telescript is an interpreted, object-oriented language that is used to control communications and messages sent between computers and personal intelligent communicators (“PICs,” in General Magic jargon). Using Telescript, electronic messages are no longer benign sequences of ASCII characters, but instead include intelligence enabling messages to perform additional personalized services.

For example, a message may include a script to route a message to the recipient using a wireless connection if the message has sat in the user’s regular mailbox for over an hour. Using General Magic’s terminology, Telescript enables users to send smart messages, using smart envelopes, arriving in smart mailboxes with each component capable of performing intelligent operations.

Telescript is designed to be portable so that engines which interpret the language can be hosted on multiple operating systems ranging from handheld personal communicators to standard desktop computers running Apple’s Macintosh OS or Microsoft Windows. However, since Telescript is a language, it does not have a user interface. Marc Porat stated that one can loosely think of Telescript as being to communications what Postscript is to printing.

Magic Cap

Magic Cap is the trademarked name for the Communicating Applications Platform and can be thought of as a development environment for Telescript. Cap is designed to run on both personal intelligent communicators as well as desktop computer operating systems. Magic Cap incorporates the Telescript system and, using Cap, General Magic and third-party developers will be able to create and customize communicating applications and services. Magic Cap also includes a simple-to-use user interface, however this was not demonstrated during the announcement.

Sony, Motorola, and Philips all intend to build communicating devices using Magic Cap. It will also be possible to develop Telescript-based interfaces and applications using other development environments that license the Telescript language.

Alliance Members are Investors

Aside from having plans to develop products around General Magic technologies, each of the alliance partners is an equity investor and sits on the Board of Directors of General Magic. This alone distances the company from the average start-up, even in Silicon Valley.

One of the most significant aspects of the announcement is AT&T’s plans to build a network service using Telescript, enabling personal communicators and desktop computers to communicate. In this scenario, Telescript will serve as the much-needed lingua franca of the personal communicator world. AT&T also plans to integrate Telescript into its personal communicators, currently designed by EO, Inc. These actions, in conjunction with its deal with McCaw Cellular Communications, clearly demonstrate AT&T’s strategic commitment to this emerging market.

No Hardware from G.M.

General Magic also made it clear that they will not be manufacturing their own devices, nor do they plan to provide information services directly to end-users. Instead, they plan to focus on advancing Telescript and Magic Cap, while also possibly distributing other software products. Having observed the progress of the fledgling personal communicator market, they are firmly rooted in reality and expect early adopters to serve as their initial market. However, Porat also emphasized that the difference between consumer and business users is quickly fading as people constantly need to juggle information concerning all aspects of their lives. Of course, General Magic hopes to expand this market significantly as the price point of hardware drops in the future. Marc Porat, talking to members of the press at the company’s Mountain View headquarters before the announcement, pointed across the street to the local Department of Motor Vehicles and stated that the everyday people in that building were General Magic’s ultimate target audience.

Contact:

General Magic
2465 Latham Street
Mountain View, CA 94040
415-965-0400

The Right Idea But Can it Succeed? Telescript and Magic Cap are exactly what’s needed to take both communications and computing to the next step, where users are no longer aware of operating systems or platforms, but simply deal with the information they need. But many great ideas such as Telescript have failed to succeed in the marketplace due to fierce competition or lack of customers. There are two big challenges to General Magic: Microsoft and the buying public. If Microsoft does not support Telescript and comes out with a communications protocol of its own, we will still be faced with multiple standards — a problem that has plagued the computer industry throughout its history. Secondly, consumers must be willing to pay for these devices and services. At first, they are bound to be expensive. Cellular phone costs are typically several hundred dollars per month. Electronic information services such as Lexis and Nexis cost close to $100 per hour. These costs, plus the cost of the devices themselves must drop dramatically for this market to succeed.