Akio Morita: a rice cooker and a Walkman that won't record

Akio Morita came from a traditional family of sake brewers in Japan and was the eldest son, destined to inherit the business. He chose physics and electronics. In 1946, in a Tokyo destroyed by war, he founded with Masaru Ibuka Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo, a small radio repair shop that would later be called Sony.

The no

The first no came from the kitchen itself. One of the first products the company tried to make was an electric rice cooker: a wooden tub with aluminum electrodes at the bottom. It didn't control the cooking well, and the rice came out raw or burnt depending on the day. The product never really reached the market.

The second came decades later, inside a company that was already large. In 1979, Sony was preparing a portable tape player, small, with headphones, made from one of its own recorders with the recording function taken out. Many people inside the company and in retail doubted a tape device that couldn't record. Accounts from the time say Morita personally took on the risk of the launch; the figures attributed to that bet vary from source to source, so we don't repeat them.

In its first month on sale, in July 1979, the Walkman sold little.

What they did

After the rice cooker, the company got it right with tape recorders, in 1950, and with the TR-55 transistor radio, in 1955, Sony's first. Morita traveled the world to sell the brand and insisted on a short name, easy to say in any language: Sony.

The Walkman conquered the world after a campaign that took the device into the streets, with people walking, skating and cycling with headphones on. It changed the way people listen to music: alone, on the move, anywhere. In 1986, "walkman" entered the Oxford dictionary.

What this has to do with Bairo

Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez recognizes two lessons in this story.

The first is the rice cooker's: the first attempt is rarely the one that works, and that says nothing about the last. In his count, it was the seventh.

The second is that of the device "missing a function". Sometimes, what others see as a defect is the idea itself. Bairo says he brought to his business, years before it became a trend, a technology idea people said wouldn't work. That time, he gave up. Years later, the trend arrived, and he kept the lesson of not stopping at the first answer.

Read: The sun is for everyone · The seventh attempt · No is the foundation of yes

Sources

• History of Sony (Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo, rice cooker, TR-55): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Sony
• Akio Morita (biography): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akio_Morita
• Nippon.com, "Sony's Morita Akio: Marking 100 Years Since the Birth of a Japanese Business Legend": https://www.nippon.com/en/japan-topics/g01027/
• Mental Floss, "Recorded History: The Sony Walkman Turns 40": https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/65620/july-1-1979-sonys-walkman-changes-recorded-history
• Walkman: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walkman