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A smart business hub can be crucial to a company’s survival.
But some of the world’s most famous tech companies changed strategy so drastically you’d barely recognize their past lives.
In the current economic climate, the conventional wisdom is that 90 percent of all startups fail.
So it’s probably for the best that Nokia moved from toilet paper to telecommunications and Samsung traded dried fish for consumer electronics.
Test your knowledge below:
Samsung started here in 1938 as Samsung Sanghoe, a grocery company selling dried fish, noodles and vegetables in Daegu, South Korea
Samsung: from dried fish to smartphones
Samsung started life as Samsung Sanghoe, a grocery store selling dried fish, noodles and vegetables in Daegu, South Korea in 1938.
After World War II, Samsung’s owner Lee Byung-chul moved the company to manufacturing, first opening a sugar refinery, and then establishing a clothing company in 1954.
Before becoming known as a challenger to Apple and Sony, Samsung was known for owning the largest wool factory ever built in Korea at the time.
But it wasn’t until 1970 that Samsung started to make a name for itself with technical consumer products: first black and white televisions, then color televisions, calculators and even air conditioners.
Lee made another unusual gamble in 1983: he opened a semiconductor factory to supply chips to American and Japanese technology companies.
Apple’s young iconoclastic co-founder, Steve Jobs, was one of the first to visit the factory – the start of a beautiful friendship that only deteriorated when Samsung emerged as one of Apple’s direct competitors.
In 2011, Apple accused Samsung of lifting designs for both the iPhone and iPad and sued their former chipmakers for $2.5 billion over alleged patent infringement.
Samsung was eventually ordered to pay just under $600 million.
To put that in perspective, Samsung’s market cap today is $326.2 billion USD or about $10.9 pounds of Korean dried anchovies ($29.99 per pound) on Amazon.
Nokia: from Finnish-made toilet paper to telecommunications
Well over a century before the company became synonymous with its indestructible brick of a mobile phone, Nokia started out as a wood pulp mill.
The paper goods, including Nokia toilet paper, were a signature product of the brand.
Founded in 1865 near the Tammerkoski Rapids in southwestern Finland by mining engineer Fredrik Idestam, Nokia takes its name from the Nokianvirta River along which Idestam established his second factory in 1871.
Founded in 1865 near the Tammerkoski Rapids in southwestern Finland, Nokia started out as a wood pulp mill. The paper goods, including Nokia toilet paper, were a signature product of the brand
By the mid-20th century, Nokia’s expansion had resulted in mergers with Finnish Rubber Works, which manufactured Nokia rubber boots and tires, and Finnish Cable Works, which laid the foundations for Nokia’s telecommunications cable and electronics business.
The company was a true pioneer in mobile phone technology, introducing the Mobira Senator car phone in 1982 and the Mobira Talkman portable car phone in 1984.
After a failed billion-dollar attempt by Microsoft to take over Nokia’s mobile phone business, the Finnish company has now made a strong return to telecom infrastructure. It has teamed up to build 5G wireless radio base stations in Japan and is now preparing to expand its business beyond the world.
In 2020, Nokia signed a $14.1 million deal with NASA to establish the first-ever 4G mobile network on the moon.
Sega: From military base slots to a racing hedgehog
Sega started out as a legalized gambling racket. Founded as Service Games, Hawaii in 1946, the company distributed slots and other coin-operated machines to U.S. military bases in Hawaii in the post-war Pacific.
Decades before it trashed its video game competitor Nintendo with rude 1990s ads, Sega supplanted its slot machine competitor Mills Novelty Co. from Chicago by Mills’ own High Top machines and refurbish them as the Sega bell.
Sega Bells were sold in the Pacific by Service Games in Japan, Korea, Taiwan and the Philippines.
Before Sonic, Sega was Service Games, Hawaii, which spread coin-operated slots across the Pacific theater to military bases after World War II
In the 1950s, as Mills struggled to expand into the overseas markets Sega had already dominated with their own machines, ads from Mill would warn customers about their “imitation and rebuilt machines from Japan and elsewhere.”
Sega’s transition from slot machines to coin-operated video arcade games and then home consoles now seems inevitable, but the company still had to outrun its competitors.
It released a clone of Atari’s Pongcalled Pong Tron in 1973. And in 1980, it opened a rival to Atari founder Nolan Bushnell’s Chuck E. Cheese family pizza arcade franchise, which they called PJ Pizzazz.
Not as memorable as Sonic the Hedgehog, but quick thinking nonetheless.
Flickr: From Online Role Playing to Photo Sharing
The photo-sharing site Flickr was launched in 2004 by Vancouver-based company Ludicorp based on tools they originally created for what they hoped would be a massively multiplayer online roleplaying game (MMORPG).
Ludicorp MMORPG, Game Never endingproved less feasible than a photo-sharing revolution for the millennium era of digital cameras.
The photo-sharing site Flickr was launched in 2004 by Vancouver-based company Ludicorp based on tools they originally created for Game never ending, a scrapped massive multiplayer online role-playing game
“It turned out that the fun was in sharing photos,” Caterina Fake, co-founder of Ludicorp told USA Today in 2006.
Fake believes that many of the site’s winningest features, designed to share fun images of the role-playing activities, would never have come to fruition if the team had premeditatedly tried to create a photo-sharing app from to make in the public interest.
“If we had sat down and said, ‘Let’s launch a photo application,’ we would have failed,” says Fake. “We would have done all this research and done all the wrong things.”
Sony: from a wooden rice cooker to an electronics empire
Sony’s first invention, originally named Tokyo Telecommunications Research Institute, was an electric wooden rice cooker, prototyped in 1945.
The company’s founder, Masaru Ibuka, had built the device in the aftermath of Japan’s defeat in World War II, hoping to create a product that would take advantage of the country’s new power grid.
But the device, a coarse network of aluminum electrodes attached to the bottom of a wooden tub, struggled to produce reliable or tasty rice. Faced with an unregulated and inconsistent electricity, plus wide variations in rice types, the cooker often produced overcooked mush or an unwanted, undercooked crunch.
Luckily Ibuka had his first worldwide hit was in 1957, a pocket-sized transistor radio called the TR-63.
Sony’s very first invention was an electric wooden rice cooker that was prototyped in 1945. Although never marketed, the botched rice cooker resides in Tokyo’s Sony Archives, a museum dedicated to Sony’s history
Music and high-tech audio electronics quickly became the soul of Ibuka’s company. The following year, the Tokyo Telecommunications Research Institute changed to Sony Corporation: the new name was the combination of the Latin word for sound, ‘sonus’ and ‘sonny’, then a fairly common slang term for young man.
According to to Sony’s own corporate historythe combination would represent “a very small group of young people who have the energy and passion for unlimited creations and innovative ideas.”
In other words, exactly the kind of people who would enjoy making games for Sony’s PlayStation consoles.