General Magic
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| Industry | |
|---|---|
| Founded | May 1990 |
| Founders | |
| Defunct | September 2002 |
| Headquarters | Mountain View, California, United States |
| Products | |
General Magic was a company co-founded by Bill Atkinson, Andy Hertzfeld and Marc Porat that developed a new kind of handheld communications device they called a "personal intelligent communicator", which was a PDA precursor that stressed communications. During the early 1990s, Joanna Hoffman was vice president of Marketing.
The original project started in 1989 within Apple Computer, when Porat convinced Apple's CEO at the time John Sculley that the next generation of computing would require a partnership of computer, communications and consumer electronics companies to cooperate. Known as the Paradigm project, the project ran for some time within Apple, but management remained generally uninterested and the team struggled for resources. Eventually they approached Sculley with the idea of spinning off the group as a separate company, which occurred in May 1990. Porat, Hertzfeld and Atkinson were soon joined at General Magic by most of Apple's Mac 7 team, including Bruce Leak, Darin Adler and Phil Goldman.
The company initially operated in nearly-complete secrecy. By 1992 some of the world's largest electronics corporations, including Sony, Motorola, Matsushita, Philips and AT&T Corporation were partners and investors in General Magic, creating significant buzz in the industry about the mysterious company. Sculley, George Fisher (the CEO of Motorola), Norio Ogha (the chairman and president of Sony) and Victor Pelsen (the Chairman of Global Operations at AT&T) became members of the company's board of directors. General Magic announced its intentions to build an anytime, anywhere communications device and an agent-based network to host it—well before either was ready to ship—at a public event in New York in 1993, a sign of the hubris infecting the company's management. By 1994, the "General Magic Alliance" of cross-industry partners had expanded to 16 global telecommunications and consumer electronics companies, including Cable & Wireless, France Telecom, NTT, Northern Telecom, Toshiba, Oki, Sanyo, Mitsubishi and Fujitsu. Each of the so-called "Founding Partners" invested up to $6M in the company and named a senior executive to the company's "Founding Partner's Council."
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