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# Business Model

2026-10-27

The Gillette Safety Razor: Sell the Handle Cheap, Sell the Blades Forever — How a 40-Year-Old Bottle-Cap Salesman Wrote the Pricing Playbook for Printers, Consoles, and Coffee Pods

Ranked #32 on the 100 Products That Changed the World: The Gillette Safety Razor (1901, OVR 88.85 — Origin 92, Business 92, Durability 92, Scale 89, Impact 88, UX 79). Inspired by the inventor of the disposable bottle cap, King Camp Gillette and machinist William Nickerson spent six years doing what MIT metallurgists called impossible—and created the Razor-and-Blades business model copied by HP, Sony, and Nespresso.

2026-10-25

Marc Benioff: Putting 'No Software' on a Badge — The Oracle Prodigy Who Hired Fake Protesters and Turned Enterprise Software into a Utility

Ranked #39 on the 100 Product Managers Who Changed the World: Marc Benioff (OVR 88.45 — Business 95, Vision 93, Origin 90, Scale 86, Insight 84, Taste 78). Once Larry Ellison's youngest VP at Oracle, he launched Salesforce in 1999 with a slash through the word 'Software' and invented the modern SaaS industry.

2026-10-23

Ray Kroc: Making 'Consistency' the Product—How a 52-Year-Old Milkshake-Mixer Salesman Built the 40,000-Store McDonald's Machine

Ranked #37 in '100 Product Managers Who Changed the World': Ray Kroc (OVR 89.35: Business 96, Scale 93, Vision 90, Originality 88, Insight 85, Taste 80). At age 52, riddled with diabetes and arthritis, the struggling Multimixer salesman drove to San Bernardino to see why one tiny burger stand needed eight five-spindle mixers—and went on to turn a 3.5-ounce patty, a 985-page operations manual, and a real-estate flywheel into the world's most replicated physical product.

2026-10-14

100 Products That Changed the World · #21: Google Ads (AdWords)

Launched in October 2000 and reinvented in 2002 with Quality Score and generalized second-price auctions. Google did not invent pay-per-click, but pure highest-bidder auctions were turning search engines into spam-filled junkyards. By multiplying bid by click-through rate, AdWords let relevant ads beat deep pockets — creating the greatest cash machine in corporate history and funding the free internet. Ranked

2026-10-13

100 Products That Changed the World · #20: Netflix Streaming

In January 2007, Netflix officially launched its on-demand streaming service. It ended half a century of broadcast scheduling tyranny with binge-watching, stripped annoying commercials with pure monthly subscriptions, and in 2011 cannibalized its own soaring DVD-by-mail cash cow. Ranked

2026-09-05

The Credit Card's Product History, and Why It Ranks 4th

On September 18, 1958, Bank of America mailed 60,000 BankAmericards into one city's mailboxes. No applications, no interviews. Delinquency ran past 20% in the first year and the man who ran the project quit within two. In fiscal 2025 Visa alone cleared $13.9 trillion across 257.5 billion transactions. This walks the product history and explains the 95.50 score.

2026-09-04

Coca-Cola's Product History, and Why It Ranks 3rd

On May 8, 1886, one Atlanta pharmacy sold the first glass for five cents and averaged about nine drinks a day that first year. Today the company's beverages sell more than 1.9 billion servings a day across 200+ countries. This walks the product history in order, then explains exactly how it scores 95.65 and lands behind the iPhone and Google Search.