1 July 1979: Sony puts music in your pocket
Sony launched the Walkman in Japan, a portable cassette player with no recording function and no speaker, which some insiders thought was a fatal flaw. Customers disagreed. The Walkman became one of the best-selling gadgets ever and made personal, portable music a habit decades before the smartphone. It also proved that removing features can create a category, as long as the remaining one is the thing people actually want.
The lesson: Products win by solving a real want simply; a missing feature matters less than a clear purpose.
What it meant for investors
$1,000 in Sony at the start of 1990 → $3,500 today, vs $19,429 in the S&P 500.
We start the clock at the start of 1990, the first year in our price data after the event. That is 3.5 times the money, but $15,929 less than a plain index fund made over the same years.
What Sony teaches: Turnarounds often come from shrinking rather than expanding; Sony recovered by exiting businesses where it had no edge and concentrating on the few where it did.
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1990 | $40.00 | $3,500 | $19,429 |
| 1995 | $45.00 | $3,111 | $14,783 |
| 2000 | $140 | $1,000 | $4,626 |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
What if you bought Sony? Every starting year and the full story →
Could you have called it at the time? The wheel picks the year, you pick the position, ten seconds a pick.
Play Sixty-40