9. Sony in USA General Magic Technologies and market creation in USA

9. Sony in USA

General Magic Technologies and market creation in USA

 

1）　The management of General Magic is spun-out from Apple computer. The investors are; AT&T, Motorola and Sony General Magic to develop “Telescript” Network software and AT&T is to deploy this technology to setup new concept network in the USA

General Magic to develop Magicap Operating system for Motorola and Sony and they to develop handhelds devices to be able to connect ATT network to maximize the benefit of Telescript and Magicap O/S

 

2) The investment

As I understood, the initial decision for the investment were somehow agreed between Mr. Mickey Schulhof and Mr. Norio Ohga and subsequent decision of the future investments were also somehow pre- agreed between them before a decision at the investment committee of Sony Corp.

The investment provided by AT&T, Motorola and Sony became so large,

there was No ceiling for investors amount, it has been continues request from General Magic and three investors continue to invest until their products and services become available in public

 

3) Technology

The technologies on paper were great ideas and if this was implemented

in a device and provided by AT&T network service, it will become

a instant success.

 

4) Obstacles

a) The quality of Telescript and Magicap O/S are very low, there are not

useable to implement to a commercial products and services.

b) The speed of development is very slow and many bugs that require to fix.

c) Other related technologies takes much more time to develop such as

high speed modem, cheaper priced memories, smaller chipset, CPU, etc. etc.

d) The software to be build-in the handheld units are somewhat confused

in terms of who are the right targeted customer, what kind of application the customer required etc.

e) There was No such common sense as we, handheld manufacturer

have such as fix the features, decide size of memories, decide how to

implement patch software and how large the software should be.

f) The engineers in General Magic are excellent people but hey had too many ideas but not enough traffic controllers and management.

g)　The majority of Sony engineers are located in Tokyo and the initial market is USA,　and all General Magic engineers are located Palo Alto, California.

h) This distance created additional delay of development work.