Sony Group Corporation

Masaru Ibuka and Akio Morita founded Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo — Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corporation — in the bombed-out Shirokiya department store in Tokyo in May 1946, with ¥190,000 in capital and 20 employees. Japan had surrendered nine months earlier. The founders' original product was a rice cooker that failed to cook rice properly. Their second product, a wire recorder for tape recording audio, worked better. Ibuka later said the failed rice cooker taught them that innovation required multiple attempts.

Sony — as the company was renamed in 1958, combining the Latin "sonus" for sound with the American slang "sonny" — launched Japan's first transistor radio in 1955. Morita personally took the product to the United States to sell it to Bulova, who offered to buy 100,000 units but required them to carry the Bulova name. Morita refused, insisting the Sony name appear on every product. Bulova's representative reportedly told him: "Our company name is a 50-year-old name. Who has ever heard of Sony?" It was the right decision.

Sony launched the Walkman in July 1979 — a portable cassette player that allowed people to listen to music privately while moving through the world. Sony's own market research suggested it would fail — people, researchers said, would not want to listen to music alone in public. Ibuka overruled the research because he wanted one for himself. The Walkman sold 50,000 units in its first two months. Over 400 million Walkmans were eventually sold. The concept of personalised portable entertainment that the Walkman introduced is the direct ancestor of the iPod, the smartphone, and streaming audio.

Sony launched the PlayStation in Japan in December 1994, entering a gaming market dominated by Nintendo and Sega. The PlayStation used CD-ROMs rather than cartridges, dramatically reducing game production costs and enabling more complex games. Within two years, PlayStation had outsold Nintendo 64. Sony had entered the gaming market almost by accident — the PlayStation had originally been developed as a CD-ROM add-on for the Super Nintendo, in collaboration with Nintendo, before Nintendo cancelled the partnership. Sony turned their cancelled Nintendo project into an industry-defining product.

Sony acquired Columbia Pictures in 1989 for $3.4 billion in one of the most expensive Japanese acquisitions in Hollywood history. The studio lost money for years and was widely mocked as an example of Japanese corporations overpaying for American glamour. Yet Columbia Pictures eventually became one of Hollywood's most valuable studios. Sony's more consequential miss was streaming: the company that had invented portable music with the Walkman, and controlled a music label and film studio, was perfectly positioned to build what became Spotify and Netflix. It built neither.