General Magic
That building the right product ten years early gives you the same outcome as building the wrong one.
- Director
- Sarah Kerruish, Matt Maude
- Year
- 2018
- Runtime
- 93 min
In 1994 they described the smartphone: touchscreen, app store, email, emoji. All of it worked. The company died.
What makes the documentary valuable is that it shows timing as a condition rather than a skill. The team contained people who later built the iPhone, eBay and Android. Same people, same idea, different decade.
It is the most expensive example of the “good technology, bad distribution” pattern I keep writing about in Radar. There was no network, no battery, and nobody wanted to carry it.