I worked for France Télécom on their General Magic project, circa 1996. My job was to work on the payment and e-commerce aspects of the platform, and I came to the conclusion it was bound to fail because it lacked any provisions for transactional integrity, and asked to be transferred to another project.
The Magic Cap UI, while cute, was hampered by the limitations of hardware back then, but the backend was the real killer. Their distributed-agent technology was half-baked, and despite AT&T Bell Labs's heroic efforts to make it work (including building an entire language, High Telescript, to make it usable), it failed anyway.
The Magic Cap UI, while cute, was hampered by the limitations of hardware back then, but the backend was the real killer. Their distributed-agent technology was half-baked, and despite AT&T Bell Labs's heroic efforts to make it work (including building an entire language, High Telescript, to make it usable), it failed anyway.