Marc Porat stretches his arms and smiles from behind his wire-rim glasses. Fit and trim in his black turtleneck, looking for all the world like your last therapist (the one you went to as penance for failing to read Iron John), Porat is selling his dream to a roomful of journalists. It's about relationships, he says, about the human being as a design factor. It's about the guy waiting in line at the DMV - he doesn't want to deal with technology, he only wants something if it does something for him. The reporters nod.
As he fingers the non-working prototype of his dream, a nifty box the size of a shortened pocket dictionary complete with a tiny cellular phone and a pen interface, Porat talks about whole-person thinking, about deconstruction, about internal dialogs and transitional processes and Post-It notes flying out of the sky. And - Porat isn't afraid to say it, in fact he leans forward and proclaims it - it's about self-esteem. "Those guys down at the DMV," he enjoins, "they tell us, 'Don't give me anything that will damage my self-esteem.'"
True to his words, Porat hasn't given those poor slobs at the DMV anything, much less anything that might damage their self-esteem. He's selling mindshare, a dream that might take a "biological generation" to come true. If the journalists are puzzled, they're too polite to mention it. In a low-key backgrounder the week before the Big Announcement, Porat is introducing them to General Magic, a new kind of company, a company that "isn't interested in changing the world one yuppie at a time." Not sure whether they qualify as yuppies or even if they're ready for such a departure, the journalists smile and nod some more. Neat stuff. I'd like to have one someday. ("I'm dying on this story," a local TV news reporter later tells me. "What the hell am I supposed to say?")
Well, besides a lot of pseudo-therapy talk, we think General Magic is the latest expression of that trend we like to call Alliance-ware. Created within Apple to define the next step beyond personal computing, General Magic was spun off and "partnered" with AT&T, Motorola, Sony, and Philips, to name a few.
Yep, the Big Names are at it again, this time joining forces to proclaim the Apple spin-off the neatest thing since touch-tone keypads. In fact, General Magic will redefine telephony, Porat says. Think of it: You can dash off a note on a personal digital assistant (PDA), touch Send, and viola! it appears on the recipient's PDA. All through the magic of a standard programming language called Telescript (Porat calls it "the PostScript of the telephone network") and General Magic's MagicCAP interface. Anyone can license General Magic's wares (unless you're a phone company other than AT&T, which has a two-year exclusive deal).
Will it take off? General Magic didn't announce a release time or price schedule, but the initial market is obvious: It's a power tool for the info-elite. When you look at the economics, the guy at the DMV will be waiting in line for quite a long time.
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