TAG

# Sony

2026-10-26

PlayStation: How a $1 CD-ROM Toppled Nintendo's Empire — The Console Born from Public Humiliation and a Three-Second Speech ('299')

Ranked #31 on the 100 Products That Changed the World: PlayStation (1994, OVR 88.95 — Impact 92, Durability 92, Business 90, Scale 89, UX 87, Origin 85). Born after Nintendo publicly betrayed Sony at the 1991 CES, Ken Kutaragi's gray box replaced $15 cartridges with $1 CD-ROMs, aged up the gaming audience by a decade, and became the first console in history to ship 100 million units.

2026-10-17

100 Product Managers Who Changed the World · #32: Ken Kutaragi

The 'Father of the PlayStation' and former CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment. In 1988, fascinated by his daughter's Famicom, he secretly designed the legendary SPC700 audio chip for Sony's rival Nintendo; after Nintendo humiliated Sony at the 1991 Chicago CES by tearing up their CD-ROM partnership on stage, Kutaragi defied Sony's aristocratic anti-toy executives ('Do we just stand down?!'), bet everything on real-time 3D polygons and $1 CD-ROMs, and built the 500-million-unit PlayStation empire. Ranked #32 among the 100 PMs who changed the world, with an overall score of 90.30 (displayed as 90) — vision 94, originality 93, scale 90, taste 88, business 88, insight 86.

2026-09-06

No. 11 of the Greatest Product Managers: Akio Morita — He Was Right About the Walkman and Wrong About How People Would Use It

The Walkman shipped on July 1, 1979 with an initial run of 30,000 units. It sold 3,000 in its first month. Sony staff spent weekends on trains and busy streets handing headphones to strangers; August sold 27,000 and cleared the run. By the end of March 1999, 186 million cassette Walkmans had been sold. Morita ranks 11th at 94.20 — vision 98, but insight only 92, because he put two headphone jacks on it.