Quote · Planet Money
We almost had a smartphone in the 90s. Why did it fail?
Where this was said
Lesson 3: Leaders Without Managers — The Big Bang Calendar
At 17:59 · chapter starts 17:46
The third and most vivid lesson involves the difference between leaders and managers. General Magic was led by legendary programmers — people everyone admired and deferred to. But those leaders weren't equipped to set deadlines, establish priorities, or tell engineers what not to do. The result was a culture where any good idea got worked on, regardless of whether it was the right priority. [1] — David Epstein "General Magic had visionary leaders but no managers. Without anyone setting priorities or saying no, engineer Steve Perlman spent enormous …" 17:46 Epstein's emblematic example is engineer Steve Perlman, tasked with writing a calendar function. He started with 1904–2096. A leader suggested it should go back further for historical apps — so he rewrote it to cover year 1. Then another team asked why he was anchoring it to a 'religious context' — so he rewrote it again to span from the Big Bang to the far future. If he'd stayed with the original scope, it would have been four lines of code. Instead, it became an enormous time sink. The lesson: because they could do anything, they did.
General Magic had visionary leaders but no managers. Without anyone setting priorities or saying no, engineer Steve Perlman spent enormous time expanding a simple calendar function — from a 4-line task into code covering from the Big Bang to the future. Because they could, they did.
Without constraints or a manager to say no, General Magic engineer Steve Perlman rewrote the device's calendar function to span from the Big Bang to the distant future — a task that could have been 4 lines of code.
