# doaipm — DO AI PM · full content for LLMs
> Become a product manager in the AI era. Speak it, and AI builds it (言出法随).
> This file contains the full text of doaipm's articles so AI search engines can
> retrieve and cite them directly. Canonical site: https://doaipm.com/en/
> Method: https://doaipm.com/en/method/ · Skill: https://github.com/zhitongblog/doaipm-skill
Core ideas: trust the AI (don't tool-hunt); not knowing how to code is an advantage;
high-fidelity first (build a real runnable prototype, not wireframes); the five-phase
workflow Discover → Define → Design → Develop → Validate; and a safety net (no real
secrets in prototypes, the human presses irreversible buttons, ask when unsure).
Maintained by zhitong (智通) · https://zhitong.uk
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# Ray Kroc: Making 'Consistency' the Product—How a 52-Year-Old Milkshake-Mixer Salesman Built the 40,000-Store McDonald's Machine
URL: https://doaipm.com/en/blog/pm-rank-37-ray-kroc/
Published: 2026-10-23
Tags: 100 Product Managers, Ray Kroc, McDonalds, Franchising, Standardization, Business Model
In the summer of 1954, **Ray Kroc** was 52 years old, suffered from diabetes and incipient arthritis, had already lost his gallbladder and most of his thyroid gland, and was watching his livelihood evaporate.
A high-school dropout from Oak Park, Illinois, Kroc had spent seventeen years selling paper cups and another decade peddling the **Prince Castle Multimixer**—a heavy metal contraption that could blend five milkshakes at once. By 1954, suburban competition was killing neighborhood soda fountains, and Kroc's sales were in free fall.
Except for one baffling anomaly: a tiny, octagonal drive-in hamburger stand in dusty **San Bernardino, California**, run by two brothers named **Dick and Mac McDonald**, had somehow bought **eight** Multimixers—enough to spin **forty milkshakes simultaneously**.
Kroc flew to California to see the operation with his own eyes. Standing outside that San Bernardino window at lunchtime, he witnessed a miracle that the McDonald brothers had invented but had no desire to scale:
**The product wasn't the 15-cent hamburger. The product was the kitchen behind the glass—an assembly line that applied Henry Ford's factory floor to hot food and delivered a bag of burgers, fries, and a shake in 15 seconds flat.**
In our ranking of the **100 Product Managers Who Changed the World**, **Ray Kroc** stands at **#37** with an overall score of **89.35** (scored by Claude AI under our unified six-dimension framework): **96 in Business, 93 in Scale, 90 in Vision**, 88 in Originality, 85 in Insight, and 80 in Taste.
He ties Game Boy creator **Gunpei Yokoi (#36, OVR 89.35)** to the second decimal place on the exact opposite dimensional shape: where Yokoi scored 93 in Taste and 85 in Business, Kroc scored **96 in Business and 80 in Taste**—turning the systematic elimination of culinary variance into a 40,000-store global empire.
## 1. The Brothers Wanted a Quiet Porch; Kroc Wanted Ten Thousand Stores
When Kroc watched the San Bernardino stand in 1954, he saw why 1950s American drive-ins were broken. Traditional drive-ins employed rollerskating carhops, offered 30-item menus, took half an hour to serve lukewarm food on china plates that customers stole, and attracted teenage loiterers.
Dick and Mac McDonald had engineered the **Speedee Service System** through radical subtraction:
1. **Slashed 87% of the Menu**: Realizing that hamburgers accounted for over 80% of sales, the brothers axed barbecue, tamales, and chili, shrinking the menu to nine items centered on burgers, fries, and shakes;
2. **Eliminated Waitresses and Dishwashers**: Replaced china and silverware with paper wrappers, asking customers to walk up to the window themselves;
3. **Replaced "Cooks" with a Choreographed Line**: Having drawn the kitchen layout in chalk on a tennis court behind their house, the brothers broke burger assembly into repeatable stations—one grill man, one dresser with custom sauce dispensers that squirted an exact dollop of ketchup and mustard in a single click, one fry man.
Yet when Kroc asked why they hadn't blanketed America with hundreds of stores, Dick McDonald pointed to their mansion on the hill and said: **"We're making $100,000 a year, Mr. Kroc. If we open more, we'll never have a moment's peace."**
The brothers were brilliant *0-to-1* inventors who hated travel and management. Kroc walked out with a franchise agreement that gave him a razor-thin **1.9% cut of gross sales** (0.5% of which went straight to the McDonald brothers) and opened his first model store in Des Plaines, Illinois, on **April 15, 1955**.
| Pillar of the Kroc Machine | Why 1950s Franchising Was Broken | Kroc's Productized Architecture | Global Outcome |
| :--- | :--- | :--- | :--- |
| **The 985-Page Manual & Hamburger U. (1958–1961)** | Franchisees cut corners on meat and added random local dishes | Codified patty weight, onion dice size & oil recovery curves; founded **Hamburger University** | Identical burger and fry experience across 40,000+ stores in 100+ countries |
| **Single-Store Licensing & Zero Equipment Kickbacks (1955)** | Rival chains sold whole states upfront and gouged franchisees on kitchen gear | **Refused equipment markups**; granted only one store at a time until the operator proved QSC compliance | Aligned incentives; franchisees invented the **Big Mac, Egg McMuffin & Filet-O-Fish** |
| **Franchise Realty Corp. (1956)** | A 1.4% net royalty left Kroc's headquarters with just $90,000 in cash | Leased/bought land, built the store, and **subleased to franchisees at a markup + % of sales** | Solved cash flow overnight and turned McDonald's into a global real-estate colossus |
| **The $2.7M Buyout & Frozen Fry Engineering (1961–1966)** | McDonald brothers vetoed kitchen changes; fresh potatoes varied by season | Borrowed **$2.7M at brutal interest** to buy out the brothers; partnered with Simplot on **frozen par-fried Russets** | Unlocked global supply-chain scaling while keeping fry crispness invariant |
## 2. Why McDonald's True Product Was a 985-Page Spec Sheet
Before software engineers wrote cross-platform operating systems, Ray Kroc wrote the **McDonald's Operations and Training Manual**—begun in 1958 by Fred Turner at 75 pages and eventually expanded past **750–985 pages**.
To Kroc, a hamburger wasn't cuisine; it was an industrial component with tolerances as tight as a piston ring:
- **The Patty**: Exactly **1.6 ounces** (10 to a pound), **3.875 inches** in diameter, with fat content locked between **19% and 20.5%**, dressed with **0.25 oz of rehydrated onions**, a **0.75-inch dollop of mustard**, **0.5 oz of ketchup**, and a single pickle slice;
- **The Science of the French Fry**: Why did McDonald's fries taste better than everyone else's? Kroc sent field engineers with hydrometers and thermometers into potato curing sheds and fry vats. They discovered that Russet Burbank potatoes had to be cured for three weeks to convert sugars to starch, blanched at 325°F, and pulled the exact moment the vat temperature recovered by **3 degrees Fahrenheit**. Kroc commissioned custom electric fryers with automatic timers so a 17-year-old part-timer in Ohio could replicate the exact crispness of San Bernardino without thinking;
- **The 10-Minute Trash Rule**: Any burger sitting on the warming rack longer than ten minutes—or fries older than সাত-to-ten minutes—had to be thrown out immediately.
In February 1961, Kroc opened **Hamburger University** in the basement of the Elk Grove Village restaurant, awarding graduates a degree in **"Bachelor of Hamburgerology."**
Kroc understood a profound product truth: **people do not stop at McDonald's on the interstate hoping for a culinary surprise; they stop because they want zero risk.** The Golden Arches promised that whether you were in Peoria, Tokyo, or Frankfurt, the bathroom would be clean, the coffee would be hot, and the fry would taste exactly like childhood.
## 3. "You Are Not in the Burger Business; You Are in the Real Estate Business"
By 1956, Kroc had a fatal problem: his stores were packed, his franchisees were getting rich, and **McDonald's Corporation was going broke**—with barely $90,000 in the bank.
Because Kroc refused tofollow the sleazy industry norm of marking up milkshakes and kitchen stoves sold to franchisees, his 1.4% net royalty couldn't cover national expansion.
Enter financial wizard **Harry Sonneborn**, former VP of Finance at Tastee-Freez, who looked at Kroc's books and delivered the most famous pivot in retail history:
**"Ray, you're not in the hamburger business. You're in the real estate business."**
Together they formed **Franchise Realty Corporation (1956)**:
1. Instead of letting franchisees find their own lots, McDonald's leased or bought the land at major suburban intersections and erected the building;
2. McDonald's then **subleased the turnkey restaurant to the franchisee** at a **20%–40% markup over its own mortgage/lease cost, OR 5%–8.5% of gross sales—whichever was higher**;
3. Even better, tying the franchisee's lease to the operating manual gave Kroc the ultimate enforcement lever: **if a franchisee refused to clean the restrooms or watered down the shake mix, Kroc could evict them as their landlord.**
In 1961, tired of the McDonald brothers blocking every operational tweak, Kroc borrowed **$2.7 million in cash** from college endowment funds (a loan that ultimately cost $14 million with interest) to buy the brothers out completely—and then famously opened a Ray Kroc McDonald's directly across the street from the brothers' renamed San Bernardino stand until it closed.
## 4. Why Ray Kroc Ranks #37 (OVR 89.35)
In our **100 Product Managers Who Changed the World** framework, Kroc's six-dimension breakdown explains the mechanics of mass standardization:
- **Business 96 & Scale 93** (Twin Peaks): Kroc's "three-legged stool" (McDonald's, franchisees, and dedicated suppliers like Simplot and OSI) created the blueprint for modern franchising—where the franchisor only wins *after* the franchisee succeeds;
- **Vision 90, Originality 88, Insight 85**: Because the McDonald brothers invented the original Speedee kitchen, Kroc's Originality sits at 88; his genius was seeing that the kitchen itself was a replicable product;
- **Taste 80** (Why #37): Just like Henry Ford (#12, Taste 80) and Jack Ma (#14, Taste 80), industrializing a product for billions requires stripping away artisanal nuance—putting Kroc in a dead-heat 89.35 tie with #36 **Gunpei Yokoi** (Taste 93, Business 85).
See Ray Kroc's full ranking on the live leaderboard: [Top 100 Product Managers (#37 · Ray Kroc)](/en/rankings/#pm-kroc), and read our companion deep dive on the system itself: [100 Products That Changed the World (#8 · The McDonald's System)](/en/great-products/).
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# The Pill: How the Only Medicine That Needs No Name Redrew the Curve of Women in Universities and the Workforce
URL: https://doaipm.com/en/blog/product-rank-29-the-pill/
Published: 2026-10-23
Tags: 100 Great Products, The Pill, Enovid, Product History, UX Design, Healthcare
Walk into any pharmacy in the English-speaking world and ask for **"The Pill."**
You don't need to specify a chemical compound, a dosage, or a pharmaceutical brand. Out of tens of thousands of prescription drugs invented in human history, only one is universally identified by a capitalized definite article.
At the end of 1999, when *The Economist* surveyed the past thousand years to name the single most consequential technological innovation of the millennium, it passed over the steam engine, the transistor, and the personal computer—and put **Enovid**, the first oral contraceptive pill approved by the US Food and Drug Administration on **May 9, 1960**, on the cover.
Why would economists rank a tiny hormone tablet alongside the printing press?
Because for all of recorded history prior to 1960, half of the human race could not reliably **schedule the next five years of their lives**. A twenty-two-year-old woman could not confidently commit to a four-year medical degree and a three-year residency—nor would law firms and corporations invest in promoting her—when a single unplanned pregnancy could end her career overnight.
**The Pill did something no law or protest had ever accomplished: it turned childbearing from an unpredictable stroke of fate into a schedulable human decision.**
In our ranking of the **100 Products That Changed the World**, **The Pill** stands at **#29** with an overall score of **89.35** (scored by Claude AI under our unified six-dimension framework): **97 in Impact, 95 in Originality, 92 in Durability**, 87 in Scale, 82 in Experience, and 82 in Business.
## 1. The Four Outsiders: How a $2 Million Personal Check Built What Big Pharma Refused to Touch
By standard business logic, a blockbuster product destined for ratusan of millions of daily users should have been developed by Pfizer or Merck.
In reality, in 1950 **not a single major pharmaceutical company or US government agency dared touch oral contraception.** Thirty American states still enforced 19th-century **Comstock Laws** that classified distributing birth-control information—or even a doctor prescribing it—as a felony offense. Drug executives were terrified of Catholic boycotts and criminal prosecution.
Instead, The Pill was willed into existence by an improbable alliance of **four outsiders**:
1. **The Product Visionary—Margaret Sanger (Age 71)**: After decades of arrests fighting for reproductive clinics, Sanger realized in 1950 that barrier methods failed because they required preparation in the heat of the moment. She defined the exact product brief: **women needed a systemic tablet taken with morning orange juice, completely separated from the act itself**;
2. **The Sole Angel Investor—Katharine Dexter McCormick (Age 75)**: Only the second woman ever to graduate from **MIT** with a biology degree (Class of 1904) and heir to the International Harvester fortune. When every foundation and drug company refused to fund the research, McCormick pulled out her personal checkbook in 1953 and wrote **$2 million in personal checks (over $23 million today)**—funding practically the entire development of The Pill out of her own pocket;
3. **The Exiled Biologist—Gregory Pincus & Min Chueh Chang**: Fired by Harvard in the 1930s after the press sensationalized his early *in vitro* fertilization experiments on rabbits, Pincus worked out of a converted carriage house in Worcester, Massachusetts. Together with reproductive biologist **M. C. Chang**, he proved that synthetic progestins (first synthesized from Mexican wild yams by Carl Djerassi at Syntex and Frank Colton at Searle) reliably halted ovulation;
4. **The Devout Catholic Obstetrician—Dr. John Rock**: A revered Harvard clinician and daily communicant who ran the human trials under the legal umbrella of treating infertility and menstrual disorders, and insisted on a **21-days-on, 7-days-off regimen** so the drug mimicked a natural monthly cycle.
| Milestone | The Regulatory & Human Bottleneck | The Counter-Intuitive Product Move | Historical Outcome |
| :--- | :--- | :--- | :--- |
| **1951–1953 Funding Freeze** | Comstock Laws criminalized contraception; NIH & Big Pharma refused funding | MIT alumna **Katharine McCormick personally funded $2M** (~100% of R&D) | The most consequential single-angel venture bet in medical history |
| **1957 Regulatory Trojan Horse** | Direct contraceptive approval was politically explosive | Approved by FDA in 1957 for **"severe menstrual disorders"** with a warning that it prevented ovulation | Hundreds of thousands of American women suddenly reported "severe menstrual disorders" overnight |
| **May 9, 1960 FDA Approval** | Fierce institutional resistance to approving a drug for healthy patients | G.D. Searle submitted massive trial data; FDA approved Enovid for contraception | **1.2M users within 2 years**; **6.5M American women within 5 years** |
| **1962 The Dialpak Dispenser** | "Take 21 days, pause 7 days" caused widespread missed-day confusion | Engineer David Wagner invented the **day-of-the-week rotary compact + 7 placebo sugar pills** | Created the universal **28-day habit-loop packaging** still used worldwide |
## 2. The Greatest UX Fix in Medicine: Why a 28-Day Pack Contains 7 Sugar Pills That Do Nothing
From a purely pharmacological standpoint, The Pill's instructions were a user-experience nightmare: **take one white tablet for 21 consecutive days, stop for 7 days, and restart on day 29.**
When Enovid first shipped in 1960, it came in an ordinary brown glass bottle filled with loose pills. Every morning, millions of women stared at the bottle in panic: *"Did I already take today's pill before making coffee, or was that yesterday? And what day of the week did my 7-day break start?"*
In 1962, an Illinois mechanical engineer named **David Wagner** heard his wife Doris worry that she had lost count of her Enovid schedule. At his kitchen table, Wagner sketched US Patent 3,136,412—the **Dialpak rotary blister dispenser**:
1. **Externalizing Memory onto the Packaging**: By arranging 21 pills in a circular wheel printed with the days of the week (`SUN, MON, TUE...`), the package itself became a state machine. A single glance told the user whether Tuesday's pill had been popped;
2. **The 7-Placebo Habit Loop**: Soon after, pharmaceutical designers added **7 inert iron or sugar pills** in a contrasting color at the end of the cycle. Why pay to manufacture and package seven pills with zero active medicine? Because **building a daily habit ("take one pill every morning, 365 days a year") is infinitely easier for the human brain than counting a 7-day gap.**
That combination—day-of-the-week blister indexing plus placebo continuity—remains one of the greatest industrial-design triumphs in healthcare.
## 3. Claudia Goldin's Curve: How One Tablet Transformed Law Schools, Medical Schools, and Marriage
In their landmark study *"The Power of the Pill,"* Harvard economist **Claudia Goldin** (winner of the 2023 Nobel Prize in Economics) and Lawrence Katz traced what happened when US states lowered the age of majority in the late 1960s and early 1970s, giving unmarried college-age women legal access to The Pill:
- **The Professional School Inflection Point**: Until 1969, women made up fewer than **5% to 9%** of first-year students in American law, medical, dental, and MBA programs. Almost immediately after young women gained access to The Pill, female enrollment surged vertically toward **35%–50%**;
- **Eliminating the Career Penalty of Early Marriage**: Because women no longer had to choose between abstinence and the risk of an career-ending early pregnancy, the median age of first marriage rose by several years—the exact window required to complete advanced professional training.
## 4. Why The Pill Ranks #29 (OVR 89.35)
In our **100 Products That Changed the World** framework, The Pill's scores reflect its civilizational weight:
- **Impact 97, Originality 95, Durability 92**: An Impact score of 97 puts it in the top ten across all 99 products on our board. Sixty-six years after Enovid, over **150 million women** worldwide still take oral contraceptives daily;
- **Scale 87**: Because its direct user base is bounded by sex and reproductive age, its raw population reach sits at 87 compared to universal commodities like Aspirin (#26, Scale 96);
- **Experience 82 & Business 82** (Why #29): First-generation pills carried hormone doses nearly ten times higher than modern formulations, causing side effects from nausea to thromboembolism (Experience 82), and off-patent generics keep margins modest (Business 82)—placing it in an exact **89.35 OVR tie** with #28 [Taobao](/en/great-products/) (Business 92, Experience 85).
See The Pill's live ranking on our board: [100 Products That Changed the World (#29 · The Pill)](/en/great-products/), alongside #26 [Aspirin](/en/great-products/).
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# Gunpei Yokoi: 'Lateral Thinking With Withered Technology'—How a Factory Repairman Built the Game Boy and Beat Every High-Spec Rival
URL: https://doaipm.com/en/blog/pm-rank-36-gunpei-yokoi/
Published: 2026-10-22
Tags: 100 Product Managers, Gunpei Yokoi, Nintendo, Game Boy, D-Pad, Product Philosophy
One day in 1979, 38-year-old Nintendo R&D director **Gunpei Yokoi** was riding the Shinkansen bullet train home to Kyoto.
Across the aisle sat a bored Japanese salaryman in a business suit. With nothing to read and nowhere to go, the commuter was staring down at a pocket LCD calculator, absentmindedly mashing its buttons with his thumb just to pass the time.
Most engineers would have looked away. In Yokoi's mind, that single mundane gesture ignited a multi-billion-dollar revelation:
**What if you took the dirt-cheap liquid-crystal display of a pocket calculator and turned it into a miniature game machine the size of a business card—one an adult could play discreetly on a crowded train without anyone noticing?**
That flash of insight produced the **43.4-million-selling Game & Watch** series, gave birth to the **cross-shaped directional pad (D-Pad)** used on virtually every controller on earth, and laid the direct foundation for the **118.69-million-selling Game Boy**.
In our ranking of the **100 Product Managers Who Changed the World**, **Gunpei Yokoi** stands at **#36** with an overall score of **89.35** (scored by Claude AI under our unified six-dimension framework): **93 in Taste, 92 in Originality, 90 in Vision, 90 in Insight**, 87 in Scale, and 85 in Business.
If Shigeru Miyamoto (#10) is Nintendo's master storyteller and Satoru Iwata (#35) was its programmer-statesman, Gunpei Yokoi was the **founding philosopher of Nintendo hardware**—the man who personally mentored a young Miyamoto and coined the doctrine that guided Nintendo for half a century: **"Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology" (*Kareta Gijutsu no Suihei Shikō*)**.
## 1. From Playing-Card Machine Mechanic to Toymaker: The 1.2-Million-Selling Office Contraption
When Yokoi graduated from Doshisha University in 1965 with a degree in electronics, his grades were unimpressive. While his classmates joined prestigious electronics giants like Sharp and Matsushita (Panasonic), the 24-year-old Yokoi took a humble maintenance job at a local Kyoto playing-card factory: **Nintendo**.
At the time, Nintendo had zero presence in electronics. It was a struggling card manufacturer whose stock had just collapsed after the Disney character-card boom faded.
In 1966, Nintendo's iron-willed president Hiroshi Yamauchi toured the Uji plant and discovered that Yokoi had been using the company lathe in his spare time to build an extendable wooden lattice claw for his own amusement.
Summoned to the president's office, Yokoi expected to be fired on the spot. Instead, Yamauchi told him: **"Stop fixing machines. Turn that contraption into a Christmas product."**
Renamed the **Ultra Hand** and priced at 800 yen, Yokoi's extendable grabber sold **1.2 million units** during the 1966 holiday season, rescuing Nintendo's balance sheet and launching its first dedicated R&D division—with Yokoi as its sole engineer.
Over the next fifteen years, Yokoi turned discarded components from other industries into cultural phenomena:
1. **Solar Cells into the *Laser Clay Shooting System* (1970–1973)**: Partnering with Sharp engineer Masayuki Uemura (who later designed the Famicom/NES), Yokoi repurposed industrial optoelectronic sensors into light guns that converted abandoned bowling alleys across Japan into virtual shooting ranges;
2. **Surplus Calculator Screens into *Game & Watch* and the Cross D-Pad (1980–1982)**: Because Japan's calculator price war had left Sharp with massive overcapacity in monochrome LCD segments and button batteries, Yokoi bought those commodity parts for pennies. When adapting *Donkey Kong* into a clamshell dual-screen unit in 1982, a traditional joystick wouldn't let the lid close—so Yokoi invented the flat **cross-shaped D-Pad** (US Patent 4,687,200), winning a Technology & Engineering Emmy Award and defining game input forever.
| Defining Creation | The "Withered" Commodity Tech | Yokoi's Lateral Leap | Historical Outcome |
| :--- | :--- | :--- | :--- |
| **Ultra Hand (1966)** | Pantograph wooden linkage & simple rivets | Added target balls to turn a mechanical reacher into a skill game | **1.2M units sold**; transformed Nintendo from a card printer into a toy innovator |
| **Game & Watch & Cross D-Pad (1980–1982)** | Overcapacity calculator LCDs & watch batteries | Pocket-sized commuter toy + built-in clock + **flat cross D-Pad** for clamshell folding | **43.4M units sold**; D-Pad became the universal directional input standard |
| **Game Boy (1989)** | Unbacklit monochrome STN LCD + 8-bit Sharp LR35902 | **Rejected power-hungry color screens** for 30-hour battery life + bundled *Tetris* | **118.69M units sold**; outlasted Sega Game Gear, Atari Lynx & NEC TurboExpress |
| **Virtual Boy (1995)** | Red monochrome LED array + oscillating mirrors | Attempted premature 3D VR hardware before display tech was mature | **Discontinued at 770K units**; the one time Yokoi violated his own "withered tech" rule |
## 2. Why a Blurry Pea-Green Screen Crushed Every Full-Color Handheld on Earth
When Yokoi unveiled the **Game Boy** in April 1989, tech journalists and rival executives treated it like a punchline.
Look at the competition lining up against Nintendo that year:
- **Atari Lynx (1989)** boasted a backlit **4,096-color screen** and 16-bit hardware sprite scaling;
- **Sega Game Gear (1990)** packed a vibrant full-color backlit display and an optional TV tuner;
- **NEC's TurboExpress (1990)** literally played full-blown home-console HuCard games in color on the go.
And what did Gunpei Yokoi ship? A chunky grey brick with **no color, no backlight, four shades of murky olive-green on a reflective STN screen, and noticeable motion blur**. Even engineers inside Nintendo rebelled, begging Yokoi to switch to a color LCD before Nintendo became a laughingstock.
Yokoi refused to budge. While his rivals optimized for trade-show spec sheets, Yokoi optimized for **how a ten-year-old child actually lives**:
1. **Battery Life Was the Real Bottleneck**: In 1989, a color backlit screen was a battery furnace. Sega's Game Gear and Atari's Lynx devoured **six AA batteries in just 3 to 4 hours**, weighed half a kilogram, and cost $149–$179. Yokoi's unbacklit monochrome Game Boy ran for **up to 30 hours on four cheap AA batteries** and launched at **$89.99 (12,500 yen)**;
2. **Indestructibility as a Feature**: Because it used mature, rock-solid components, a Game Boy could survive being dropped off a school bus—or famously surviving a **barracks bombing during the 1991 Gulf War** with its plastic shell melted to a crisp while still booting *Tetris* on the original motherboard;
3. **The *Tetris* Bundle**: Paired with *Tetris*—a game whose high-contrast falling blocks looked crystal-clear on a four-shade monochrome grid—the Game Boy transcended kids' bedrooms and hooked millions of adult travellers.
The market verdict was merciless. Atari Lynx sold roughly **3 million units**; Sega Game Gear sold **10.62 million**; Gunpei Yokoi's "outdated" monochrome Game Boy line sold **118.69 million units**.
That was the triumph of **"Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology"**: wait until a technology is so mature, cheap, and reliable that engineers consider it boring—then apply lateral imagination to solve a human problem that bleeding-edge silicon is too expensive and fragile to touch.
## 3. The Tragic Final Act: Virtual Boy and a Highway in Ishikawa
In a twist worthy of Greek tragedy, the man who preached never using immature technology was ultimately brought down by the one project that broke his own commandment.
In the mid-1990s, pressured to demonstrate 3D innovation while the Nintendo 64 was delayed, Yokoi spearheaded the **Virtual Boy (1995)**—a stereoscopic 3D console using oscillating mirrors and red LEDs.
Unlike calculators in 1980, head-mounted 3D optics in 1995 were nowhere near "withered." High-resolution color LEDs were prohibitively expensive, forcing Yokoi to use jarring red-on-black visuals. Legal fears over children walking around blindfolded or straining their necks forced Nintendo to mount the visor on a rigid tabletop stand, forcing players to hunch over a desk in solitary isolation.
Yokoi himself felt the unit wasn't ready, but commercial schedules pushed it onto shelves in July 1995. It sold just **770,000 units** before being pulled.
On August 15, 1996, Yokoi resigned from Nintendo after 31 years, founded **Koto Laboratory** in Kyoto, and immediately began designing the clever dual-orientation **WonderSwan** handheld for Bandai (named in tribute to him).
He never saw it launch. On the morning of **October 4, 1997**, after a minor fender-bender on the Hokuriku Expressway in Ishikawa Prefecture, the 56-year-old Yokoi stepped out of his car to inspect the damage and was fatally struck by a passing vehicle.
## 4. Why Gunpei Yokoi Ranks #36 (OVR 89.35)
In our **100 Product Managers Who Changed the World** framework, Yokoi's scores reflect the purest hardware-experience craftsman in gaming history:
- **Taste 93 & Originality 92** (Twin Peaks): Inventing the Cross D-Pad, the portable handheld category, and *Metroid*—while having the discipline to choose 30 hours of battery life over flashy color pixels—represents world-class product judgment;
- **Vision 90 & Insight 90**: His "Withered Technology" doctrine directly shaped the DS, the Wii, and the Nintendo Switch decades after his death;
- **Scale 87 & Business 85** (Why #36 vs. #35 Iwata at 89.45 and #37 Ray Kroc at 89.35): Yokoi ties Ray Kroc at 89.35 raw OVR on completely opposite strengths (Kroc's Business 96 & Scale 93 vs. Yokoi's Taste 93 & Originality 92), and sits 0.10 behind Satoru Iwata, who carried Yokoi's philosophy onto the global CEO stage.
Explore Gunpei Yokoi's full profile on the live leaderboard: [Top 100 Product Managers (#36 · Gunpei Yokoi)](/en/rankings/#pm-yokoi), alongside his protege [Shigeru Miyamoto (#10)](/en/rankings/#pm-miyamoto) and successor [Satoru Iwata (#35)](/en/rankings/#pm-iwata).
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# Taobao: Free Storefronts, IM Haggling, and Escrow—How a SARS Quarantine Startup Flipped eBay's 72% China Monopoly in 24 Months
URL: https://doaipm.com/en/blog/product-rank-28-taobao/
Published: 2026-10-22
Tags: 100 Great Products, Taobao, Alibaba, Jack Ma, E-Commerce, Product History
In April 2003, inside Apartment 202 of Building 16 at Lakeside Gardens in Hangzhou—the exact same bare-concrete flat where Jack Ma had founded Alibaba four years earlier—seven handpicked engineers and operators signed non-disclosure agreements and locked themselves inside.
Outside, the **SARS epidemic** had paralyzed China. Alibaba's main headquarters was under quarantine after an employee returned from the Canton Fair with a suspected fever. Inside the apartment, led by Sun Tongyu and legendary coder Cai Jingxian ("Duolong"), the seven-person squad slept on camp cots, ate instant noodles, did handstands against the wall to stay awake, and built a consumer marketplace from scratch in less than a month.
On **May 10, 2003**, **Taobao.com** quietly went live. Because they had no sellers yet, the first 200 items listed on the site were personal knick-knacks the seven founders dug out of their own bedrooms.
At the time, Silicon Valley treated the project as a suicide mission. Just two months earlier, global juggernaut **eBay** had completed its **$150 million acquisition of EachNet**, commanding a crushing **72.4% share** of China's consumer e-commerce market. eBay signed exclusive multi-million-dollar ad blockades across China's top three web portals (Sina, Sohu, and NetEase) so Taobao couldn't even buy a banner ad, and executives famously predicted that **Taobao would be dead within 18 months**.
Instead, within **24 months (by late 2005)**, the scoreboard had completely inverted: **Taobao held 72.2% of China's C2C e-commerce market, while eBay EachNet had collapsed to 26.7%**—forcing eBay's eventual retreat from China in 2006.
In our ranking of the **100 Products That Changed the World**, **Taobao** stands at **#28** with an overall score of **89.35** (scored by Claude AI under our unified six-dimension framework): **93 in Impact, 92 in Business, 91 in Scale, 91 in Durability**, 85 in Originality, and 85 in Experience.
How did a seven-person apartment project defeat the richest e-commerce empire on earth? Because eBay imported an American garage-sale auction template, while Taobao built three product mechanisms tailored to Chinese reality: **free storefronts, live IM haggling, and escrow payments**.
## 1. Masterstroke #1: Zero Listing Fees Against eBay's Pay-to-List Wall
To understand why eBay stumbled in China, you have to look at how eBay made money.
In the United States, brick-and-mortar retail was already dominated by Walmart, Target, and national mall chains. Americans used eBay primarily to auction off second-hand collectibles from their attics. Consequently, eBay charged sellers two mandatory fees:
- **An upfront insertion fee** just to list an item for 14 days (whether it sold or not);
- **A final value commission** of 2% to 8% when the item sold.
In 2003 China, however, national retail chains barely existed outside major coastal cities. The people who wanted to sell online weren't suburban homeowners clearing out attics—they were **millions of small family workshops and street-market vendors in Yiwu, Hangzhou, and Guangzhou** looking for a digital storefront. Asking a small apparel vendor with 300 SKUs to pay upfront listing fees every two weeks before making a single sale was a non-starter.
In July 2003, Taobao dropped a bomb on the market: **100% free store creation, free item listings, and zero transaction commissions for three full years.**
When eBay blocked Taobao from advertising on major portals, Taobao bought cheap banner slots across tens of thousands of grassroots Chinese bulletin boards (BBS), anime forums, and parenting communities—surrounding eBay's castle from the bottom up.
| Product Dimension | eBay EachNet's Silicon Valley Playbook (2003–2005) | Taobao's Local Counter-Design | Market Chain Reaction |
| :--- | :--- | :--- | :--- |
| **Listing & Transaction Fees** | Upfront listing fee per item + 14-day expiry + sales commission | **100% Free for 3 Years** (unlimited SKU listings, zero commission) | Millions of small shopkeepers and power sellers migrated en masse from EachNet to Taobao |
| **Buyer–Seller Communication** | **Strictly blocked direct chat** to prevent off-platform fee evasion | Built-in **AliWangwang live IM** with voice, emojis & instant price editing | Turned cold web forms into a bustling bazaar where buyers could haggle in real time |
| **Stranger Payment Trust** | Wire money or mail a postal order first, then pray the seller ships | **Alipay Escrow (Oct 2003)**: platform holds funds until buyer confirms delivery | **Conversion rates leapt from <30% to 80%+**, birthing China's digital payment infrastructure |
| **Storefront Architecture** | Global "Morgan" migration to US servers; auction-countdown sorting | Persistent **merchant storefronts** ranked by hearts, diamonds & crowns | Enabled full-time "Taobao villages" and spawned Double 11, Cainiao logistics & Alibaba Cloud |
## 2. Masterstroke #2: Why eBay Forbade Buyers and Sellers From Talking—While Taobao Built AliWangwang
If you ask veteran Chinese sellers what finally drove them off eBay EachNet in 2004, they point to two things: eBay's decision to migrate China's servers onto its unified global platform in the US (which made pages load at a crawl across the Pacific), and **eBay's refusal to let buyers and sellers chat in real time**.
Why did Silicon Valley product managers forbid live chat on eBay?
Because **eBay charged a transaction commission**. If buyers and sellers could message each other freely in real time, they would immediately exchange phone numbers and settle the deal off-platform to dodge eBay's cut.
Because Taobao charged **zero commission**, it had no fear of off-platform leakage. Instead, Taobao recognized a fundamental truth of Chinese commerce: **in China, shopping is a social sport—nobody buys a jacket from a stranger without asking three questions and haggling five yuan off the shipping fee.**
Taobao embedded a real-time instant messenger—**AliWangwang**—directly onto every product page:
- A buyer could click a glowing blue icon, ask the shopkeeper for real-life photos, bargain over bundle discounts, and watch the seller adjust the checkout price on the fly;
- The iconic **"Ding-Dong!"** notification chime of AliWangwang became the soundtrack of millions of Chinese living-room entrepreneurs;
- Customer service reps on Wangwang invented the affectionate **"Qin" (Dear)** slang that defined Chinese internet culture for a decade.
**eBay policed its marketplace like a quiet Sotheby's auction room; Taobao designed a noisy, vibrant night market.**
## 3. Masterstroke #3: A 750-Yuan Used Camera and the Birth of Alipay Escrow
Even with free listings and live chat, Taobao hit a brick wall in autumn 2003: **people window-shopped, chatted for hours, and then walked away at checkout because nobody trusted a stranger on the internet.**
In October 2003, a Xi'an university student named **Jiao Zhenzhong** wanted to buy a used Fujifilm FinePix 2600 digital camera listed for **750 yuan ($90)** by **Cui Weiping**, a Chinese student studying in Yokohama, Japan. Neither dared go first.
On **October 15, 2003**, Taobao launched **Alipay Escrow**:
1. Jiao wired 750 yuan to Taobao's escrow account;
2. Taobao notified Cui in Japan that the funds were locked in custody and safe to ship;
3. Only after Jiao received the camera and clicked "Confirm Receipt" did Taobao release the 750 yuan to Cui.
When Jiao got cold feet midway and called customer support asking for his money back, a Taobao operator personally guaranteed that Taobao would reimburse him out of pocket if the camera didn't arrive. That single 750-yuan receipt (`#200310156442565`) unlocked Chinese e-commerce—and spun off into **Alipay (#13 on our Products leaderboard)**.
## 4. Why Taobao Ranks #28 (OVR 89.35)
In our **100 Products That Changed the World** framework, Taobao's six-dimension profile captures an ecosystem engine:
- **Impact 93, Business 92, Scale 91, Durability 91**: Taobao didn't just digitize retail; it forced three entire industries into existence from scratch—express parcel logistics (delivering 100B+ parcels a year for pennies), digital escrow payments (Alipay), and hyperscale cloud computing (Alibaba Cloud was born to survive Taobao's Double 11 traffic spikes);
- **Originality 85 & Experience 85** (Why #28): Online C2C marketplaces were pioneered by eBay (#28 Originality 85), and over two decades Taobao's interface has grown notoriously dense with gamified promotions, coupon math, and algorithmic clutter (Experience 85)—leaving it tied at 89.35 OVR with #29 **The Pill** (whose shape is the exact inverse: Originality 95 & Impact 97, Business 82 & Experience 82).
See Taobao's live position on the leaderboard: [100 Products That Changed the World (#28 · Taobao)](/en/great-products/), and read the profile of its chief architect: [Jack Ma (#17 · Solving the Trust Problem)](/en/rankings/#pm-jack-ma).
---
# Satoru Iwata: 'President on My Card, Coder in My Head, Gamer at Heart'—How Nintendo's Programmer-CEO Put Grandma and Grandson on the Same Console
URL: https://doaipm.com/en/blog/pm-rank-35-satoru-iwata/
Published: 2026-10-21
Tags: 100 Product Managers, Satoru Iwata, Nintendo, Wii, NDS, Switch
In March 2005, on the main stage of the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco, 45-year-old Nintendo president **Satoru Iwata** adjusted his wire-rimmed glasses and opened his keynote with three sentences that became immortal in Silicon Valley and Kyoto alike:
**"On my business card, I am a corporate president. In my mind, I am a game developer. But in my heart, I am a gamer."**
Plenty of tech CEOs claim to be builders at heart. Iwata was one of the vanishingly rare Fortune 500 chief executives who could literally walk into a struggling engineering war room over the weekend, read raw assembly code, and rewrite the compression engine himself to ship the product on time.
When Nintendo's iron-fisted patriarch Hiroshi Yamauchi stepped down in May 2002 after 53 years at the helm, he bypassed his own family to appoint the 42-year-old Iwata—making him the **first president from outside the Yamauchi bloodline since Nintendo was founded in 1889**.
In our ranking of the **100 Product Managers Who Changed the World**, **Satoru Iwata** stands at **#35** with an overall score of **89.65** (scored by Claude AI under our unified six-dimension framework): **93 in Insight, 92 in Taste, 90 in Vision**, 89 in Originality, 88 in Scale, and 86 in Business.
While Sony's PlayStation and Microsoft's Xbox locked horns in a multi-billion-dollar arms race over teraflops and photorealistic shaders, Iwata pivoted Nintendo ninety degrees into the Blue Ocean. Armed with a stylus (**Nintendo DS, 154 million sold**) and a motion wand shaped like a TV remote (**Wii, 101.6 million sold**), he turned hundreds of millions of mothers, commuters, and nursing-home grandparents into gamers.
## 1. The Miracle Coder: "Using What You Have Takes Two Years; Doing It From Scratch Takes Me Six Months"
Before he ever sat in the president's office in Kyoto, Iwata was a legendary programmer and turnaround CEO at **HAL Laboratory**.
Most product managers are at the mercy of engineering estimates when a codebase tangles. Iwata was the programmer other programmers called when a project was clinically dead:
1. **Saving *EarthBound / Mother 2* (1994)**: Shigesato Itoi's ambitious RPG had been stuck in development hell for four years and was on the verge of cancellation. Iwata inspected the spaghetti code and delivered his famous ultimatum: *"If we use what you have now, it will take two years. If you let me start over from scratch, I'll do it in half a year."* Within **one month**, Iwata had the rebuilt engine running; within six months, a masterpiece was born;
2. **Fitting Two Whole Worlds into *Pokémon Gold & Silver* (1999)**: When Game Freak ran out of space on the Game Boy cartridge after building the new Johto region, Iwata wrote a custom graphics compression algorithm that freed up so much memory the team was able to pack the entire original **Kanto region** into the post-game—creating the most beloved plot twist in *Pokémon* history;
3. **Porting *Pokémon Stadium* in Three Weeks Without Documentation (1998)** and debugging *Super Smash Bros. Melee* (2001): Even after joining Nintendo's corporate executive ranks, Iwata spent nights reading raw battle code line by line so *Melee* wouldn't miss the GameCube's launch window.
Because he had written 6502 assembly code on bare metal and personally paid off HAL Laboratory's **1.5 billion yen bankruptcy debt** in the 1990s, Iwata carried a rare dual instinct: **he knew exactly how much magic could be squeezed out of modest silicon, and he knew that technical arrogance divorced from human joy kills companies.**
| Defining Campaign | Industry Consensus & Crisis | Iwata's Counter-Intuitive Bet | Historical Outcome |
| :--- | :--- | :--- | :--- |
| **Saving *EarthBound* & *Pokémon Gold/Silver* (1994–1999)** | Tangled codebase; Game Boy ROM completely full | Personally rewrote game engine & custom compression tools | Delivered two regions in one cartridge; rescued flagship franchises |
| **Nintendo DS (2004)** | Sony's powerhouse PSP threatened to end Nintendo's handheld reign | **Dual screens + touch stylus + microphone** + *Brain Age* for non-gamers | **154.02M units sold** (crushing PSP by 70M+); best-selling handheld in history |
| **Nintendo Wii (2006)** | GameCube finished dead last (21.7M); PS3 & Xbox 360 bet everything on HD | Abandoned the HD GPU arms race; designed **a one-handed TV-remote controller** | **101.63M units sold**; brought bowling and tennis into nursing homes worldwide |
| **The 50% Pay Cut & Project NX / Switch (2011–2015)** | 3DS launch stumble & Wii U flop; Wall Street demanded mass layoffs | **Refused to fire a single employee, cut own pay by 50%**, and greenlit the hybrid **Switch** | Preserved R&D morale; posthumous **Switch sold 150M+ units** |
## 2. Why He Answered Sony and Microsoft's Supercomputers With a TV Remote
When Iwata took over as president in 2002, Nintendo's home-console business was in free fall. Market share had shrunk from 80%+ in the NES era to a distant third place with the **GameCube (21.74 million units)** versus Sony's juggernaut **PlayStation 2 (160 million units)**.
Every analyst on earth agreed on the prescription: build a brawnier box with more polygons and darker, grittier games.
Iwata looked at the living rooms of ordinary families and diagnosed the exact opposite illness: **controllers had grown so intimidating—bristling with dual analog sticks and fourteen buttons—that anyone who wasn't a teenage boy felt unwelcome picking one up.** In millions of households, the game console was a source of family friction between kids who wanted the TV and parents who hated the clutter.
Iwata formulated his **Blue Ocean "Gaming Population Expansion" strategy**: stop fighting Sony for the same twenty million hardcore players, and instead build hardware that invites the **five hundred million people who currently hate or fear video games**.
1. **The Nintendo DS (2004)**: When Sony unveiled the sleek, widescreen PSP, critics mocked Nintendo's clunky two-screen DS as a gimmick. Yet by replacing complex button combos with a familiar **stylus pen** and voice microphone—paired with titles like *Nintendogs* and Dr. Kawashima's *Brain Training*—Iwata turned commuters in their fifties into daily handheld players, moving **154 million units**;
2. **The Wii (2006)**: For Nintendo's next home console, Iwata issued three heretical constraints: the box could be no thicker than three DVD cases stacked together, it had to run whisper-quiet on minimal wattage, and **anyone from a five-year-old child to an eighty-year-old grandmother had to understand the controller within तीन seconds of seeing it.**
By modeling the **Wii Remote** on a television remote control that every human already knew how to hold in one hand—and bundling ***Wii Sports*** in the box—Iwata erased the learning curve of gaming overnight. The Wii sold **101.63 million units**, turning living rooms and senior centers into bowling alleys.
## 3. "Layoffs Impress Wall Street for a Quarter, Readily Destroying Morale for a Decade"
What elevated Iwata from a brilliant strategist to a beloved cultural icon was how he behaved when the tide turned against him.
In 2011–2013, the overpriced launch of the **3DS** and the commercial failure of the **Wii U** (13.56 million units) pushed Nintendo into its first annual operating loss in over thirty years.
At tense shareholder meetings, activist investors demanded two immediate concessions: **fire thousands of employees to pad operating margins, and abandon dedicated hardware to slap Mario onto iPhones as free-to-play gacha games.**
Iwata refused both. On predatory mobile monetization, he warned that strip-mining Nintendo's characters for quick microtransactions would destroy decades of family trust. And on layoffs, he delivered a rebuke that still echoes across the tech industry:
**"If we reduce the number of employees for better short-term financial results, employee morale will decrease. I sincerely doubt employees who fear that they may be laid off will be able to develop software titles that could impress people around the world."**
Instead of handing out pink slips, Iwata **cut his own salary by 50% twice** (in 2011 and 2014), while fellow executives like Shigeru Miyamoto took 30% cuts.
Even after being diagnosed with bile duct cancer in 2014, a visibly gaunt Iwata hosted **Nintendo Direct** broadcasts to speak directly to fans without media filters, poured his product philosophy into the **Iwata Asks** interview archives, and worked from his hospital bed to architect **"Project NX"**—the radical hybrid console that merged Nintendo's handheld and home divisions into one device.
On **July 11, 2015**, Satoru Iwata passed away at age 55. That afternoon, a real rainbow arched directly over Nintendo's white headquarters in Kyoto. Less than two years later, his final blueprint launched as the **Nintendo Switch**, selling over **150 million units** and ushering in the most profitable era in Nintendo's history.
## 4. Six-Dimension Breakdown: Why the Gamer-President Ranks #35
Under the unified six-dimension framework of *100 Product Managers Who Changed the World* (Vision 20%, Insight 20%, Taste 15%, Business 15%, Scale 15%, Originality 15%), Satoru Iwata scores as follows:
| Dimension | Weight | Score | Key Rationale |
| :--- | :---: | :---: | :--- |
| **Vision** | 20% | **90** | Rejecting the teraflop wars to pioneer the Blue Ocean "Gaming Population Expansion" and greenlighting the hybrid Switch |
| **Insight** | 20% | **93** | Saw that controller intimidation—not graphics—was the true barrier keeping 80% of humanity away from games |
| **Taste** | 15% | **92** | From *EarthBound*'s warmth to Mii avatars and the Wii Plaza, championed joyful, friction-free human interfaces |
| **Business** | 15% | **86** | Drove Nintendo to historic profit peaks during the DS/Wii era, tempered by the Wii U transition slump |
| **Scale** | 15% | **88** | Over 255M DS and Wii consoles sold under his direct watch, plus 150M+ on the Switch architecture he initiated |
| **Originality** | 15% | **89** | Co-created dual-screen touch gaming, living-room motion control, and the direct-to-fan *Nintendo Direct* format |
| **Overall (OVR)** | **100%** | **89.65** | **Ranked #35 Overall (just behind #34 Duan Yongping at 90.15, ahead of #36 Gunpei Yokoi at 89.55)** |
In an industry that too often treats users as "monetizable eyeballs" and engineers as disposable line items on a quarterly spreadsheet, Satoru Iwata left behind a permanent north star: **protect the people who build the magic, remove the fear from the interface, and never forget that in your heart, you are building for joy.**
---
# Super Mario Bros.: How a 40-Kilobyte Cartridge Taught Humanity to Play in 30 Seconds Without a Single Word of Text
URL: https://doaipm.com/en/blog/product-rank-27-super-mario-bros/
Published: 2026-10-21
Tags: 100 Products, Super Mario Bros., Shigeru Miyamoto, Nintendo, UX Design
A single animated GIF reaction you send in Slack or iMessage today weighs roughly **500 kilobytes to 2 megabytes**.
On **September 13, 1985**, Nintendo shipped a Famicom (NES) cartridge that contained eight distinct worlds, thirty-two levels, warp zones, swimming and jumping physics, dozens of enemies, and Koji Kondo's immortal soundtrack—and the **entire game fit inside 40 kilobytes of memory (32KB of program ROM plus 8KB of character graphics)**.
Armed with those **40 kilobytes**, ***Super Mario Bros.*** single-handedly resurrected the Western video game industry from the ashes of the **1983 Atari crash**, sold **over 40.24 million copies** on the NES alone (58M+ across re-releases), and launched the highest-selling game franchise in human history (**830+ million copies**).
In our ranking of the **100 Products That Changed the World**, ***Super Mario Bros.*** stands at **#27** with an overall score of **90.00** (scored by Claude AI under our unified six-dimension framework): **95 in Impact, 95 in Experience, 92 in Originality**, 87 in Scale, 87 in Durability, and 85 in Business.
Forty-one years later, why do SaaS founders, mobile app designers, and AI product managers still study **World 1-1** frame by frame? Because in thirty seconds of silent pixel art, **Shigeru Miyamoto** and **Takashi Tezuka** solved the hardest problem in software: **how to onboard a complete beginner without writing a single word of instruction.**
## 1. World 1-1: The Greatest 30-Second Onboarding Flow Ever Engineered
Every software product manager knows the tragedy of the modern onboarding modal: you build a complex product, panic that users won't understand it, and slap a five-step carousel of tooltip pop-ups over the interface on first launch.
What do users do? **Ninety-nine percent of them mash "Skip" five times without reading a word, stare blankly at the dashboard, and churn.**
In 1985, Miyamoto operated under a ruthless constraint: if a player had to read a manual or a wall of text to figure out what to do, the design had failed.
Look at the opening **thirty seconds of World 1-1**, broken down as a masterclass in zero-text UX onboarding:
| Timestamp | On-Screen Spatial Setup | User Instinct & Reaction | Silent Onboarding Lesson Completed |
| :--- | :--- | :--- | :--- |
| **Seconds 0–2** | Mario spawns on the **far left** edge of the screen facing a wide expanse of empty sky | With nowhere to go left, the player's thumb naturally presses **Right on the D-pad** | Establishes left-to-right spatial progression without a single arrow icon |
| **Seconds 3–5** | A lone, scowling brown **Goomba** strolls slowly toward Mario | Threat is unmistakable; the player presses the primary **A button to jump** over or land on it | **Lesson 1**: Teaches the jump button, collision danger, and stomping enemies |
| **Seconds 6–12** | Five overhead blocks appear; the second block and top block are **flashing gold Question (?) blocks** | Visual contrast triggers curiosity; the player jumps to bonk the flashing block, spawning a **Super Mushroom** | Rewards curiosity and introduces interactive environmental blocks |
| **Seconds 13–18** | The mushroom slides right, **bounces off a short green pipe**, and rolls straight back at Mario underneath a low ceiling of bricks | Trapped by the low bricks, the player can barely dodge it—colliding with the mushroom and **growing twice as tall!** | **Lesson 2 (Pure Genius)**: Uses geometry to force the player into a power-up so they learn mushrooms are good, not fatal |
| **Seconds 19–30** | Three green pipes of **progressively taller heights** followed by a narrow two-tile bottomless pit | The player discovers holding A longer produces a higher jump, and holding B sprints across gaps | **Lesson 3**: Masters variable jump height and momentum physics before facing real danger |
Pause on that thirteen-second mark—the **Super Mushroom bouncing off the pipe**.
In early playtests, novices saw the mushroom pop out of the question block, assumed it was another monster like the Goomba, and tried to jump over it. Instead of pausing the game with a text box reading *"Eat the Mushroom to Grow Big!"*, Miyamoto placed a short pipe to bounce the mushroom back toward the player and lowered the brick ceiling above Mario's head so jumping over it was almost impossible.
The moment the mushroom touches you, a triumphant arpeggio plays, Mario doubles in size, and the next time you jump you shatter solid bricks into dust. **In three seconds of forced spatial choreography, the player experiences pure epiphany.**
## 2. How Brutal Hardware Constraints Created a Multi-Billion-Dollar Cultural Icon
Designers love to complain when engineering budgets or screen real estate feel tight. Consider the canvas Miyamoto was handed: a **256 × 240** television display where the protagonist had to fit inside a **16 × 16 pixel grid** using at most **three colors**.
Every single iconic feature of Mario's appearance was invented not for fashion, but to solve a 16-pixel rendering limitation:
- **Why does Mario wear a cap?** Because animating hair in 16 pixels looked like aglitchy smudge; a cap saved forehead and hairline pixels;
- **Why the big nose and bushy mustache?** At 16×16 resolution, drawing a recognizable mouth with facial expressions was impossible; a prominent nose and mustache made his face direction instantly readable;
- **Why red overalls over a blue shirt?** Without contrasting straps separating his torso from his arms, Mario's swinging arms vanished into his body whenever he ran!
The cap, the mustache, the overalls—an aesthetic worth tens of billions of dollars in box-office films and theme parks—was born entirely from **functional problem-solving inside a 256-pixel box**.
## 3. The Physics of Joy: Why 40 Years of Platformers Still Copy Miyamoto's Momentum
Before *Super Mario Bros.*, video game movement was binary. In arcade classics like *Pac-Man* or even Miyamoto's own *Donkey Kong* (1981), pressing right moved your character at a fixed constant speed; releasing the joystick stopped you dead on a dime; and once you jumped, your parabolic arc was locked in mid-air like a cannonball.
Miyamoto and lead programmer **Toshihiko Nakago** revolutionized digital tactility by programming **sub-pixel velocity, acceleration, friction, and mid-air control** on an 8-bit 1.79MHz processor:
1. **Inertia and skidding**: Mario takes a few steps to build up speed, hits top sprint when you hold the B button, and visibly skids with a puff of traction when you reverse direction;
2. **Variable jump physics**: Tap A for a hop; hold A to sustain upward lift for a high jump; and steer slightly left or right in mid-air to stick a landing on a single brick.
Miyamoto and Nakago spent months tweaking those hexadecimal acceleration constants by hand before building the rest of the levels—because Miyamoto understood a truth that Apple later proved with the iPhone's inertial touch scrolling: **before a product is useful, the sheer physical sensation of touching and moving it for three seconds must feel magical.**
## 4. Six-Dimension Breakdown: Why a 40KB Cartridge Ranks #27 in History
Under the unified six-dimension framework of *100 Products That Changed the World* (Originality 20%, Scale 20%, Impact 20%, Experience 15%, Business 15%, Durability 10%), *Super Mario Bros.* scores as follows:
| Dimension | Weight | Score | Key Rationale |
| :--- | :---: | :---: | :--- |
| **Originality** | 20% | **92** | Invented modern side-scrolling level design (*kishōtenketsu* four-act structure), momentum platforming, and secret warp discovery |
| **Scale** | 20% | **87** | 58M+ copies sold for the original title, anchoring a franchise with 830M+ lifetime game sales and billions of players |
| **Impact** | 20% | **95** | Ended the 1983 North American video game crash and wrote the universal grammar of interactive software onboarding |
| **Experience** | 15% | **95** | Flawless 60fps tactile physics, Koji Kondo's earworm score, and World 1-1's invisible tutorial inside 40KB |
| **Business** | 15% | **85** | Sold 61.9M NES consoles and spawned a transmedia empire spanning a $1.36B feature film and Universal theme parks |
| **Durability** | 10% | **87** | 41 years after release, World 1-1 remains instantly playable and studied in every game and UX design program on earth |
| **Overall (OVR)** | **100%** | **90.00** | **Ranked #27 Overall (just behind #26 Aspirin at 90.10, ahead of #28 Taobao at 89.25)** |
The next time your team is tempted to add a three-paragraph pop-up tutorial explaining how to use your app, load up World 1-1 of *Super Mario Bros.* instead.
That flashing question block and bouncing mushroom from 1985 still hold the ultimate lesson in product craft: **never lecture the user with text when you can let them discover their own superpower in the first fifteen seconds.**
---
# Duan Yongping: How China's Most Elusive Product Godfather Built Subor, BBK, OPPO, and vivo—and Mentored Pinduoduo's Founder—by 'Daring to Be Late'
URL: https://doaipm.com/en/blog/pm-rank-34-duan-yongping/
Published: 2026-10-19
Tags: 100 Product Managers, Duan Yongping, BBK, OPPO, vivo, Pinduoduo
In June 2006, a 45-year-old Chinese entrepreneur named **Duan Yongping** paid **$620,100** to win Warren Buffett's annual charity lunch. Under the auction rules, the winner could bring up to seven guests. Alongside his longtime hardware lieutenants, Duan invited an unknown 26-year-old computer science graduate who had just returned from the University of Wisconsin.
Ten years later, that young guest—**Colin Huang (Huang Zheng)**—founded **Pinduoduo** and **Temu**, tearing open a duopoly that Alibaba and JD.com thought was permanently sealed.
If you unroll a map of modern Chinese consumer electronics and e-commerce, a startling pattern emerges:
- **OPPO** (led by Tony Chen) and **vivo** (led by Shen Wei), which consistently rank among the world's top five smartphone makers, along with **OnePlus** (Pete Lau) and **Realme**;
- **BBK Education Electronics** and **imoo (Xiaotiancai)** smartwatches (led by Jin Zhijiang), which have dominated Chinese K–12 educational hardware for twenty-five years;
- **Pinduoduo / Temu** (Colin Huang) and **J&T Express** (Jet Lee)...
All of these fiercely independent empires—generating hundreds of billions of dollars in combined annual revenue—trace their lineage back to one soft-spoken man who retired from day-to-day management at age 40 in 2001.
In our ranking of the **100 Product Managers Who Changed the World**, **Duan Yongping** stands at **#34** with an overall score of **90.15** (scored by Claude AI under our unified six-dimension framework): **95 in Business, 93 in Insight, 92 in Vision**, 87 in Originality, 86 in Taste, and 86 in Scale.
He was never a design autocrat obsessing over a 1mm bevel like Jony Ive, nor a first-principles technologist like Elon Musk. Instead, Duan engineered something arguably rarer: a repeatable organizational and product operating system built on **"Benfen" (staying true to duty), "Daring to Be Late," and a ruthless "Stop Doing List."**
## 1. Turning a Clone Red Ocean into a National Brand: The Subor "Learning Machine" Insight
In March 1989, 28-year-old Duan Yongping took over a bankrupt electronics workshop in Zhongshan, Guangdong, carrying **2 million RMB in debt** and a dozen soldering irons.
At the time, Nintendo's Famicom (NES) was sweeping the globe. In early-1990s China, however, an imported Nintendo console cost over **1,000 RMB**—nearly a full year's wages for a factory worker—while street stalls overflowed with shoddy knockoff consoles that burned out after a week.
More importantly, Duan spotted a structural split between the **user** and the **payer**:
- The user was a ten-year-old child desperate to play *Contra* and *Super Mario*;
- The payer was a working-class Chinese parent terrified that video games would ruin their only child's future.
Instead of competing in a race-to-the-bottom price war selling cheap game consoles, Duan redefined the category in 1993 with the **Subor (Xiaobawang) Computer Learning Machine**:
1. **A brilliant hardware graft**: He housed the 8-bit console motherboard inside a full **PC-style mechanical keyboard**, bundling a cartridge that taught typing, BASIC programming, and classical poetry alongside game slots;
2. **Reframing the purchase for parents**: In the early 1990s, Chinese parents were anxious that their children would be left behind in the computer age, yet a real 386 PC cost over 10,000 RMB. Duan spent 400,000 RMB—nearly all the factory's cash—to hire **Jackie Chan** for a prime-time CCTV commercial with a slogan that every Chinese millennial still knows by heart: *"All parents share the same heart; Subor helps your child become a dragon!"*;
3. **Obsessive reliability**: While rival workshops cut corners on capacitors and suffered 30%+ defect rates, Duan enforced strict drop and thermal burn-in testing, keeping Subor's defect rate **below 2%**.
At roughly **300 RMB**, children got their dream console and parents bought peace of mind. By 1995, Subor commanded **nearly 80% of China's market**, turning a 2-million-RMB deficit into **over 1 billion RMB in annual revenue**.
| Four Generations of Duan-Linked Products | Market Timing vs. First Movers | The "Dare to Be Late" Edge | Ultimate Market Outcome |
| :--- | :--- | :--- | :--- |
| **Subor Learning Machine (1991–1995)** | 8 years after Nintendo's Famicom | **8-bit console + PC keyboard + Jackie Chan ad** reframed gaming as affordable computer literacy | 80%+ domestic share; 1B+ RMB revenue; onboarded China's first generation of coders |
| **BBK VCD & Cordless Phones (1996–2000)** | Entered after Idall (Aiduo) & Siemens | Waited for laser-head supply maturity; won on **error-correction quality + profit-sharing provincial dealers** | First-mover Idall collapsed; BBK became #1 nationwide in VCDs, repeaters & cordless phones |
| **BBK Point-Reading Pen & imoo Watch (2005+)** | Entered after Noah & Ozing | Ultra-simple tap-to-read UX; **imoo locked in elementary school kids via proprietary shake-to-add-friends social graph** | Dominated Chinese K–12 educational hardware for 20 years |
| **OPPO & vivo Smartphones (2011+)** | Entered after Apple, Samsung & Xiaomi | Killed MP3/DVD lines overnight; bet on **VOOC fast charging, selfie cameras, and 200,000+ lower-tier town stores** | Consistently top 5 globally for a decade; ~40% combined share of China's smartphone market |
## 2. "Dare to Be Late": Why Duan Never Chased First-Mover Advantage
Silicon Valley worships **First-Mover Advantage**—the belief that whoever defines a category first takes the crown.
Across thirty years in hardware, Duan proved the exact opposite doctrine: **"Dare to be late, then out-execute everyone" (敢为天下后，后中争先).**
In the summer of 1995, after his equity-sharing proposal for Subor was rejected by the parent conglomerate, Duan left with six core lieutenants—including Tony Chen, Shen Wei, and Jin Zhijiang—and founded **BBK (Bubugao)** in Dongguan.
Over the next two decades, the BBK family navigated six brutal hardware transitions: VCD players, DVD players, MP3/MP4 players, feature phones, and smartphones. Remarkable as it sounds, **BBK, OPPO, and vivo were never first to market in any of those six waves.**
Why did waiting work every single time?
Because Duan understood a brutal law of mass-market hardware: **pioneers spend 80% of their capital paying two tuition fees on behalf of the entire industry—first, debugging immature supply chains with high return rates; second, educating consumers on why the category needs to exist at all.**
Under Duan's playbook:
1. **Never bet the company on unproven categories** while component yields are at 60%;
2. **Once consumer demand is proven and upstream silicon hits the maturity curve**, enter with overwhelming force around one visceral user pain point (such as OPPO's *"Charge for 5 minutes, talk for 2 hours"* VOOC flash charging) backed by China's deepest profit-sharing retail distribution network;
3. **Never fight price wars**: While early pioneers bled out from supply-chain crunches or cash-flow overextension, BBK consistently harvested the matured market with higher quality and healthier margins.
## 3. "Benfen" and the Stop Doing List: Designing an Anti-Fragile Organization
Visitors to OPPO and vivo headquarters in Dongguan are often baffled by the absence of Silicon Valley buzzwords. Instead of OKR dashboards or "wolf culture" slogans, executives talk endlessly about two deceptively simple concepts: **"Benfen" (integrity / doing one's proper duty)** and **a "Stop Doing List."**
Duan defines *Benfen* in one sentence: **"Do the right thing, and do things right."**
How does an organization know what the "right thing" is? Duan argues that human beings are terrible at predicting the future three years out, but very good at recognizing what is **fundamentally wrong**. The moment you realize an action violates long-term health—no matter how much short-term profit it generates—you put it on the **Stop Doing List** and never touch it again:
- **No OEM / contract manufacturing**: Even when factory lines sat idle and Walmart offered tens of millions for white-label orders, BBK refused—because easy OEM money destroys a team's discipline to build its own brand;
- **No credit sales or supplier squeezing**: BBK insisted on cash-on-delivery with dealers and timely payment to component suppliers, surviving every macro credit crunch that killed flashier rivals;
- **Decentralized equity and dealer partnerships**: In 1999, Duan split BBK into three independent companies (OPPO, vivo, and BBK Education), diluting his own stake to empower his protégés and binding provincial distributors as long-term equity partners. When smartphones wiped out billions in feature-phone inventory in 2011, not a single provincial distributor defected;
- **Kill mistakes immediately, regardless of sunk cost**: When OPPO spent over 100 million RMB building an internet content portal (NearMe) in 2011 and realized hardware companies lack pure portal DNA, Tony Chen and Duan shut it down within a week.
That self-correcting system allowed Duan to step down at **age 40 in 2001**, move to California, and apply the exact same product lens to public equities—investing **$2 million in NetEase in 2002** when the stock traded below $1 (reaping over **100x**), and pouring billions into **Apple in 2011** right as Wall Street doubted Tim Cook's transition, because his own smartphone supply-chain teams told him nobody on earth could match Apple's ecosystem lock-in.
## 4. Six-Dimension Breakdown: Why a Retired Hardware Hermit Ranks #34
Under the unified six-dimension framework of *100 Product Managers Who Changed the World* (Vision 20%, Insight 20%, Taste 15%, Business 15%, Scale 15%, Originality 15%), Duan Yongping scores as follows:
| Dimension | Weight | Score | Key Rationale |
| :--- | :---: | :---: | :--- |
| **Vision** | 20% | **92** | Authored the "Dare to Be Late" and "Stop Doing List" doctrines; nailed every platform shift from 8-bit consoles to smartphones and Apple's ecosystem |
| **Insight** | 20% | **93** | Decoded the split between payer and user in Chinese families (Subor, imoo) and mainstream consumers' desire for fast charging and camera beauty |
| **Taste** | 15% | **86** | Pragmatic mass-market roots that evolved into world-class industrial design in the OPPO Find and OnePlus flagship lines |
| **Business** | 15% | **95** | Engineered China's most resilient equity-aligned distributor network and mentored four separate multi-billion-dollar founders |
| **Scale** | 15% | **86** | Over 200M annual devices across OPPO, vivo, and imoo, plus his mentorship imprint on Pinduoduo's billion-user commerce engine |
| **Originality** | 15% | **87** | Rejected technical first-mover vanity to pioneer a uniquely Eastern school of decentralized governance and second-mover dominance |
| **Overall (OVR)** | **100%** | **90.15** | **Ranked #34 Overall (just behind #33 Jony Ive at 90.25, ahead of #35 Satoru Iwata at 89.65)** |
In 2026—an era when AI startups panic if they are seventy-two hours late to a model release—Duan Yongping's thirty-year track record offers the ultimate antidote to hype:
**Slow is fast. You do not need to be the first person to invent the category; you just need the discipline to stop doing short-term foolish things, and the patience to make the product people actually use every day.**
---
# Aspirin: How an 1899 Fever Pill Scored 99 in Durability by Pulling Off the Greatest Second-Act Pivot in Product History
URL: https://doaipm.com/en/blog/product-rank-26-aspirin/
Published: 2026-10-19
Tags: 100 Products, Aspirin, Bayer, Medicine, Product Strategy
On July 20, 1969, when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin touched down on the Sea of Tranquility aboard the Apollo 11 Lunar Module, tucked inside their spacecraft medical kit was a bottle of small white tablets humanity had already been taking for seventy years: **Aspirin**.
If you had to guess the longest-lived, highest-volume standardized industrial product in human history, what would it be?
It is not Coca-Cola, nor the Gillette razor blade. It is a simple nine-carbon molecule—**acetylsalicylic acid ($\text{C}_9\text{H}_8\text{O}_4$)**. Since German chemical maker **Bayer** registered the *Aspirin* trademark on **March 6, 1899**, this little white tablet has remained in continuous mass production for **127 years**. Even today, humanity manufactures roughly **40,000 metric tons** of aspirin every year—between **40 billion and 100 billion tablets** swallowed annually across the globe.
In our ranking of the **100 Products That Changed the World**, **Aspirin** stands at **#26** with an overall score of **90.10** (scored by Claude AI under our unified six-dimension framework): a ceiling-tying **99 in Durability**, 96 in Scale, 90 in Originality, 90 in Impact, 82 in Experience, and 82 in Business.
For product builders, Aspirin is more than the birth certificate of the modern pharmaceutical industry. It is the ultimate case study in **how a legacy product survives disruption**: stripped of its patents after World War I and outflanked in the 1960s by safer painkillers like Tylenol and Ibuprofen, Aspirin staged a breathtaking second act at age seventy—transforming from an occasional headache remedy into a daily life-saving shield against heart attacks.
## 1. Fixing the "Willow Bark UX Disaster": How One Acetyl Group Created Big Pharma
For more than three millennia—from ancient Egyptian papyri and Hippocrates to traditional Chinese herbalists—healers knew that chewing willow bark eased fevers and joint pain.
By the mid-19th century, European chemists isolated the active compound in willow bark and meadowsweet: **salicylic acid**.
From a product perspective, however, pure salicylic acid had a **catastrophic user experience**:
- It tasted like battery acid burning the throat;
- Worse, it tore up the stomach lining. Rheumatism patients who took salicylic acid for more than a few days suffered violent nausea, ulcers, and gastric bleeding.
In the summer of 1897, inside the laboratories of German dye maker **Bayer**, a 29-year-old chemist named **Felix Hoffmann** (working under the direction of pharmaceutical head **Arthur Eichengrün**) sought a gentler alternative for his rheumatic father, who could no longer stomach raw salicylic acid.
On **August 10, 1897**, Hoffmann acetylated salicylic acid—swapping a single hydroxyl hydrogen for an **acetyl group**—to produce chemically pure, stable **acetylsalicylic acid (ASA)**.
That single molecular tweak unlocked two foundational breakthroughs in product design:
1. **Dramatically improved tolerability**: It preserved the fever-reducing and anti-inflammatory punch while sparing the mouth and esophagus from direct chemical burn;
2. **The standardized compressed tablet (1900)**: Before Aspirin, pharmacists weighed loose powders by hand and folded them into paper packets. Bayer pressed Aspirin into uniform, water-soluble **500mg tablets** stamped with the Bayer cross—establishing the physical form factor of modern medicine.
History also recorded an astonishing twist of corporate judgment. Just **eleven days** after synthesizing Aspirin (on August 21, 1897), Hoffmann applied the exact same acetylation process to morphine, creating **diacetylmorphine—which Bayer branded and sold as "Heroin."**
Unbelievably, Bayer's head of pharmacology, Heinrich Dreser, initially rejected Aspirin as "weakening to the heart" while enthusiastically championing Heroin as a "non-addictive cough suppressant for children"! Only after Eichengrün secretly distributed Aspirin samples to Berlin physicians—who reported miraculous clinical results—did Bayer reverse course and launch Aspirin in 1899.
| Three Eras of Aspirin's 127-Year Life | Core User Problem & Positioning | Existential Crisis Faced | Strategic Pivot & Market Outcome |
| :--- | :--- | :--- | :--- |
| **Act I: The Synthetic Drug Pioneer (1899–1918)** | Solved salicylic acid's severe gastric burn; pioneered standardized 500mg tablets | Almost killed internally in favor of Bayer's Heroin cough syrup | Became the world's indispensable fever fighter during the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic |
| **Act II: Patent Loss & Painkiller Siege (1919–1970)** | WWI Treaty of Versailles confiscated Bayer's patents and trademarks in the US/UK | **Tylenol (1955) and Ibuprofen (1969)** offered pain relief with less stomach irritation and no pediatric Reye's risk | Commoditized into a penny-a-pill generic; lost primary analgesic market share |
| **Act III: The Cardiovascular Second Act (1971–Present)** | Re-engineered as **81mg/100mg enteric-coated daily low-dose tablet** | Shifted from an occasional fever pill to a lifelong daily anti-platelet regimen | Vane won the 1982 Nobel Prize; cuts secondary heart-attack risk by ~25–30%; 40B+ pills/year |
## 2. Midlife Crisis: Confiscated in WWI and Outflanked by Tylenol and Ibuprofen
Had Aspirin remained purely a painkiller, it would never have earned a **99 in Durability**. By the late 1960s, its original value proposition was under siege from every direction.
First came geopolitical expropriation. Following Germany's defeat in World War I, the **1919 Treaty of Versailles** stripped Bayer of its Aspirin patents and trademarks in the United States, Britain, France, and Russia as war reparations. (In the US, Sterling Products bought Bayer's North American rights at auction for $5.3 million; Bayer did not buy back its own name in America until **1994**, for **$1 billion**.) Overnight, *aspirin* became a generic word in the English dictionary.
Then came superior competitors in the pain aisle:
- **Acetaminophen / Paracetamol (Tylenol, 1955)** delivered fever and pain relief without irritating the stomach—and after epidemiological studies linked pediatric aspirin use during viral illnesses to rare but fatal **Reye's syndrome**, aspirin was virtually banished from children's medicine cabinets;
- **Ibuprofen (Advil / Nurofen, 1961–1969)** matched or beat aspirin on inflammatory joint pain with gentler gastrointestinal profiles.
In software or hardware, a seventy-year-old generic product outclassed on safety and UX by two younger rivals is dead walking. Instead, at age 72, Aspirin pulled off the greatest second act in medical history.
## 3. Reborn at Age 72: From Occasional Headache Pill to Daily Heart Shield
Here is one of the most humbling facts in science: **humanity swallowed hundreds of billions of Aspirin tablets between 1899 and 1970 without having the slightest idea how the drug actually worked inside the body.**
AsEarly as 1948, a observant California general practitioner named **Lawrence Craven** noticed that tonsillectomy patients who chewed excessive aspirin gum suffered unusual bleeding. Connecting the dots, Craven hypothesized that if aspirin kept blood from clotting, a tiny daily dose might prevent coronary thrombosis—heart attacks.
In **1971**, British pharmacologist **Sir John Vane** finally unlocked the molecular mechanism (winning the **1982 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine**): aspirin irreversibly blocks the **cyclooxygenase (COX)** enzyme, halting the production of prostaglandins (which cause pain and fever) and **thromboxane A2** (which tells blood platelets to clump together into clots).
Massive randomized clinical trials in the 1980s—most notably the landmark **ISIS-2 trial** and the **Physicians' Health Study**—confirmed that a tiny daily dose of aspirin (**75mg to 100mg**, less than afifth of a standard headache tablet) reduced acute heart-attack mortality by **23%** and slashed recurrent cardiovascular events by roughly a third.
Look at that transformation through a product manager's eyes:
1. **Right-sizing the dose and wrapper**: By dropping the dose to **81mg ("Baby Aspirin") or 100mg** and adding an **enteric coating** that passes intact through stomach acid to dissolve in the small intestine, manufacturers minimized gastric irritation while locking in anti-platelet efficacy;
2. **Turning an episodic purchase into a daily subscription for life**: A headache pill is taken a few times a year. Secondary cardiovascular prevention is taken **every single morning for thirty years**.
## 4. Six-Dimension Breakdown: Why 99 Durability Puts a Penny Pill at #26
Under the unified six-dimension framework of *100 Products That Changed the World* (Originality 20%, Scale 20%, Impact 20%, Experience 15%, Business 15%, Durability 10%), Aspirin scores as follows:
| Dimension | Weight | Score | Key Rationale |
| :--- | :---: | :---: | :--- |
| **Originality** | 20% | **90** | The world's first industrial synthetic drug created by modifying a natural molecule rather than extracting raw herbs |
| **Scale** | 20% | **96** | 40,000+ tons (40B–100B tablets) produced annually; stocked in virtually every hospital, pharmacy, and home on earth |
| **Impact** | 20% | **90** | Founded modern pharmaceutical manufacturing, inspired a Nobel Prize, and saved millions of lives from heart attacks and strokes |
| **Experience** | 15% | **82** | Standardized the 500mg tablet and later 81mg enteric-coated daily pill, though GI bleeding risk and Reye's syndrome remain constraints |
| **Business** | 15% | **82** | Wartime patent confiscation turned it into a ultra-low-margin generic commodity—limiting corporate profit while maximizing human access |
| **Durability** | 10% | **99** | **127 years of uninterrupted global relevance**, with ongoing clinical research into colorectal cancer prevention |
| **Overall (OVR)** | **100%** | **90.10** | **Ranked #26 Overall (clustered in the 90-point Legend tier alongside #25 Microsoft Excel at 90.05 and #27 Super Mario Bros. at 90.00)** |
In 2026, in an age of $2 million gene therapies and AI-designed biologics, a tablet invented when horse-drawn carriages ruled Berlin still sits on hundreds of millions of nightstands. Aspirin's 127-year journey proves a timeless product truth: **great products don't die when their first market matures—they find a deeper reason to exist.**
---
# Jony Ive: How the God of Industrial Design Built the iPhone, Turning Aluminum into Strategy—and Why Unchecked Minimalism Nearly Broke the Mac
URL: https://doaipm.com/en/blog/pm-rank-33-jony-ive/
Published: 2026-10-18
Tags: 100 Product Managers, Jony Ive, Apple, Industrial Design, OpenAI
In July 1997, when Steve Jobs returned to an Apple Computer that was ninety days away from insolvency, a 30-year-old British designer named **Jony Ive** was sitting in a black-curtained ground-floor studio at 1 Infinite Loop with a resignation letter already drafted in his pocket.
For the previous five years, Apple had been run by sales and finance executives who viewed personal computers as commodity circuit boards stuffed inside beige plastic boxes. Whoever shaved $3 off a molding tool got promoted. Dozens of organic, translucent foam models locked inside Ive's drawers had been killed by engineering and procurement teams as "unnecessary" or "too hard to mold."
Jobs walked through that locked studio, ran his hands over the prototypes, and delivered the verdict that changed consumer electronics forever: **"My God, we're sitting on a gold mine, and we've been shipping garbage."**
From that afternoon until Jobs's death in October 2011, an industrial design studio that even Apple Senior Vice Presidents could not badge into became the true seat of power in Silicon Valley. Jobs later explained Ive's unique standing to biographer Walter Isaacson: **"If I had a spiritual partner at Apple, it's Jony. He has more operational power than anyone else at Apple except me. There's no one who can tell him what to do, or to butt out."**
In our ranking of the **100 Product Managers Who Changed the World**, Jony Ive stands at **#33** with an overall score of **90.25** (scored by Claude AI under our unified six-dimension framework): an unprecedented **99 in Taste**, 92 in Scale, 92 in Originality, 90 in Vision, 88 in Insight, and 82 in Business.
He is both the creator who turned translucent polycarbonate, white earbud cords, and solid blocks of billet aluminum into a $3 trillion empire—and the cautionary tale of what happens when a genius of form loses his only functional counterweight, resulting in butterfly keyboards and portless laptops. Today, after merging his hardware startup **io** into Sam Altman's **OpenAI** in a landmark **$6.5 billion** deal, Ive is trying to build the post-screen device that kills the very smartphone he helped bring into the world.
## 1. The Jelly Bean That Saved Apple: When Industrial Design Beat the Spec Sheet
Today's product managers talk effortlessly about anodization, corner radii, and unboxing friction. Before 1998, however, the phrase "industrial design strategy" did not exist in the PC industry.
Compaq, Dell, and IBM competed strictly on Intel clock speeds and hard-drive megabytes. Every desktop computer on earth was a clinical beige box trailing a rat's nest of gray cables.
At the end of 1997, Jobs handed Ive a make-or-break assignment: design a $1,299 consumer all-in-one computer that could ship within six months and save the company.
Where a conventional PM would have stripped out cost to hit the $1,299 price point, Ive diagnosed an emotional barrier that engineers never saw: **ordinary families weren't avoiding computers because the megahertz were too low; they were intimidated by them.**
Ive answered that fear with three heretical product decisions:
1. **Translucent Bondi Blue polycarbonate**: Instead of hiding the electronics behind opaque beige plastic, let users see through the shell so the machine felt approachable and playful;
2. **A wide, recessed handle on top**: Even though the CRT desktop weighed 34.8 pounds (15.8 kg) and nobody carried it around like a briefcase, Ive insisted on the handle because *"if there's a handle on it, you immediately know how to touch it—it gives you permission to approach the object"*;
3. **Killing the 3.5-inch floppy drive**: Against fierce industry backlash, Apple bet entirely on USB and the internet.
To perfect the depth and translucency of the plastic without making it look like a cheap toy, Ive took his team to a **jelly bean candy factory** to study how confectioners controlled dye suspension and surface gloss. The resulting **iMac G3** case cost **$65 per unit** to manufacture—more than **three times** the ~$20 cost of a standard beige PC tower.
Any normal CFO would have vetoed an extra $45 in casing cost on a $1,299 machine. Jobs signed off immediately.
When the iMac G3 launched in August 1998, it sold at a pace of **one unit every 15 seconds**, moving nearly **2 million units** in its first year. Crucially, **32% of buyers had never owned a computer before, and another 12% switched from Windows**. Apple swung to a **$309 million annual profit** and proved a law that reshaped tech: **in a world of commoditized silicon, industrial design is not a wrapper around the product—it is the product.**
| Era-Defining Product | Material & Design Breakthrough | Counter-Intuitive Tradeoff | Market Outcome |
| :--- | :--- | :--- | :--- |
| **iMac G3 (1998)** | Translucent Bondi Blue shell + integrated top handle | $65 case (3x industry norm); killed the floppy drive | 1 sold every 15s; 32% first-time PC buyers; rescued Apple |
| **iPod (2001)** | Polished stainless steel back + stark white earphone cords | Turned hidden black wires into a public badge of identity | 70%+ MP3 player share; turned every subway car into an Apple billboard |
| **MacBook Pro (2008)** | CNC-milled Unibody carved from a single block of aluminum | Replaced 30+ stamped parts with 13-stage CNC machining | Doubled structural rigidity while locking competitors out of CNC supply |
| **iPhone 4 (2010)** | Dual aluminosilicate glass + exposed stainless steel antenna frame | Structural rim doubled as RF antenna (sparked Antennagate, set industry template) | 1.7M sold in opening weekend; blueprint for modern flagship phones |
| **Apple Watch (2015)** | Ceramic/sapphire sensor back + mechanical Digital Crown | Rejected pinch-to-zoom on tiny screens in favor of tactile hardware input | Outshipped the entire Swiss watch industry within three years |
## 2. Manufacturing as a Moat: Why Rivals Could Copy the Sketch, Never the Unibody
Many observers mistake Ive for a pure stylist steeped in the *"Weniger, aber besser"* ("Less, but better") ethos of Braun legend **Dieter Rams**. Yet what truly terrified Samsung, Dell, and HP was never Ive's sketches—it was **his mastery of factory tooling and materials science**.
In typical hardware companies, industrial designers hand pretty 3D renders over the wall to mechanical engineers, who inevitably thicken the chassis by 4mm and add a dozen screws. By contrast, Ive's twenty-person ID Studio lived for months inside machine shops in Shenzhen, Zhengzhou, and Niigata.
When designing the 2008 **Unibody MacBook**, conventional laptops were assembled from more than **30 stamped metal sheets**, plastic clips, and internal roll cages. Pick one up by a corner, and the frame flexed and creaked.
Ive and hardware engineering chief Bob Mansfield proposed an audacious alternative: take a **2.75-pound (1.25 kg) solid billet of aircraft-grade aluminum** and carve the entire chassis out of a single piece across 13 precision CNC milling operations, leaving a seamless **110-gram** skeleton with integrated keyboard wells and structural ribs.
CNC machining had previously been reserved for aerospace turbines and low-volume Swiss watch cases. By deploying Apple's massive cash hoard to buy tens of thousands of CNC machines worldwide, Ive turned an aesthetic choice into a brutal supply-chain monopoly. When Asus and HP tried to build aluminum Ultrabooks two years later, they discovered that Apple owned practically all the world's high-precision CNC capacity.
## 3. When 99-Point Taste Lost Its 100-Point Brake: The Post-Jobs Lesson
Why does Ive score a **99 in Taste** yet rank **#33 overall** with an **82 in Business**?
The answer lies in the eight years between Steve Jobs's death in October 2011 and Ive's departure in 2019—perhaps the most expensive organizational case study in modern product management: **what happens when a world-class perfectionist of form loses the only person in the building empowered to say, "It looks gorgeous, and it's miserable to use"?**
Under Jobs, Ive's hunger for thinness and visual purity had a ruthless editor. Under Tim Cook, a supply-chain master who revered design from a distance, Ive was given unchecked authority. After Scott Forstall was ousted in late 2012, Ive took over software Human Interface as well (ushering in flat design with **iOS 7**), and by 2015 he was named Chief Design Officer.
Without a functional counterweight, minimalism curdled into **formalism at the expense of the user**:
1. **The Butterfly Keyboard Fiasco (2015–2019)**: To shave less than **2 millimeters** off the MacBook's thickness, Ive's team replaced reliable scissor switches with an ultra-thin butterfly mechanism that had almost zero key travel and failed catastrophically whenever a single speck of dust settled beneath a keycap. It triggered four years of class-action lawsuits and universal fury from writers and developers;
2. **The "Trash Can" Mac Pro (2013) and Dongle Hell (2016)**: Obsessed with a symmetrical black cylinder, the 2013 Mac Pro painted itself into a thermal corner that couldn't accommodate dual-GPU upgrades. Meanwhile, the 2016 MacBook Pro stripped out MagSafe, HDMI, and the SD card slot, forcing every professional photographer and engineer to carry a tangle of USB-C dongles;
3. **The $10,000–$17,000 Solid Gold Apple Watch Edition (2015)**: Ive pushed Apple into luxury fashion with 18-karat gold smartwatches—ignoring the fundamental law that silicon ages in 18 months while gold watches are meant for generations. Within three years, those $17,000 watches couldn't even upgrade to watchOS 5.
When Ive departed Apple in 2019 to form **LoveFrom**, Apple's hardware teams immediately made the 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros **thicker and heavier**, restored the scissor keyboard, and brought back MagSafe, HDMI, and the SD card slot—sending Mac revenue and customer satisfaction to all-time highs.
## 4. Six-Dimension Breakdown and the $6.5 Billion OpenAI Bet
Under the unified six-dimension framework of *100 Product Managers Who Changed the World* (Vision 20%, Insight 20%, Taste 15%, Business 15%, Scale 15%, Originality 15%), Jony Ive scores as follows:
| Dimension | Weight | Score | Key Rationale |
| :--- | :---: | :---: | :--- |
| **Vision** | 20% | **90** | Saw a decade early that computers would evolve from beige office tools into intimate, wearable objects |
| **Insight** | 20% | **88** | Mastered emotional onboarding (the iMac handle, AirPods pairing), though late-era Mac designs ignored pro workflows |
| **Taste** | 15% | **99** | The undisputed ceiling of consumer tech industrial design; 5,000+ patents authored the visual grammar of the 21st century |
| **Business** | 15% | **82** | Enabled Apple to capture 80%+ of global smartphone profits through design margin, though luxury experiments like gold watches flopped |
| **Scale** | 15% | **92** | Over 3.5 billion iPhones, iPads, Macs, AirPods, and Apple Watches shipped bearing his physical language |
| **Originality** | 15% | **92** | Pioneered mass-scale Unibody CNC manufacturing, white-cord street iconography, and Apple Store/Park spatial design |
| **Overall (OVR)** | **100%** | **90.25** | **Ranked #33 Overall (just behind #32 Ken Kutaragi at 90.30, ahead of #34 Duan Yongping at 90.15)** |
Today, Ive is in the middle of his boldest second act. In 2025–2026, **OpenAI** acquired Ive's hardware venture **io** in a deal valued at roughly **$6.5 billion**, placing Ive and his LoveFrom collective in charge of designing OpenAI's consumer hardware family alongside Sam Altman.
Ive has spoken candidly about the moral weight of having co-created the iPhone—a slab of glass that empowered humanity but also trapped billions of people in endless algorithmic scrolling. His final bet is to design an ambient, AI-native computing form factor that frees us from the black rectangle he perfected.
For product builders, Jony Ive's career leaves behind two permanent laws:
First, **never underestimate beauty and tactility—great industrial design is the highest-margin moat in hardware.**
Second, **the moment your product is so thin and pure that your user has to buy a dongle to use it, form has betrayed function.**
---
# Microsoft Excel: How a 40-Year-Old Grid Turned One Billion Office Workers into Programmers—and Outlived Every SaaS Built to Kill It
URL: https://doaipm.com/en/blog/product-rank-25-microsoft-excel/
Published: 2026-10-18
Tags: 100 Products, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft, Productivity Software, SaaS
There is an old joke among Silicon Valley venture capitalists that happens to be entirely true: **"Every B2B SaaS unicorn funded over the past twenty years simply took one column out of Microsoft Excel, wrapped it in a pretty web UI, and charged $50 per seat—and the very first feature every enterprise customer demands is an 'Export to Excel' button."**
Beneath that punchline lies the most humbling reality in software history: **the true operating system of global civilization is neither Windows nor Linux. It is Microsoft Excel.**
From 3:00 a.m. Wall Street LBO models and Yiwu factory inventory ledgers to Formula 1 car part trackers and World Health Organization epidemiological tables, wherever money and atoms move across the planet, they eventually pass through a green grid of **1,048,576 rows by 16,384 columns**.
In our ranking of the **100 Products That Changed the World**, **Microsoft Excel** stands at **#25** with an overall score of **90.05** (evaluated by Claude AI under our unified six-dimension framework): **97 in Durability, 96 in Scale, 93 in Impact, 92 in Business**, 85 in Experience, and 80 in Originality.
Its originality score is modest because Microsoft did not invent the electronic spreadsheet. Yet its scale and durability are nearly unmatched: **41 years** after its 1985 debut, Excel commands more than **one billion active users** and remains the world's most successful stealth programming environment.
## 1. The Latecomer's Ambush: How Betting on the Macintosh GUI Toppled Lotus 1-2-3
It is easy to forget today that in **1984**, Microsoft was a hopeless underdog in spreadsheets. **Lotus 1-2-3** owned the IBM PC market with a 70%+ share, while Microsoft's text-based spreadsheet, Multiplan, was getting crushed.
Had Microsoft tried to fight Lotus head-on inside the black-and-white DOS command prompt, it would have lost.
Instead, in 1984 Bill Gates and Excel lead architect **Doug Klunder** made one of the greatest platform pivots in software history: **they killed their DOS spreadsheet roadmap and went all-in on the graphical user interface (GUI) of Steve Jobs's brand-new Apple Macintosh.**
At the time, industry veterans thought Gates was out of his mind. Corporate accountants used IBM PCs, not underpowered Macs with mice.
Yet when **Excel 1.0 for Macintosh** shipped in September 1985, Klunder's team unveiled two weapons that made every DOS spreadsheet feel prehistoric:
1. **Intelligent Minimal Recalculation**: In VisiCalc and Lotus 1-2-3, changing a single number forced the software to recalculate every cell in the entire worksheet from top to bottom, freezing the computer for seconds. Klunder spent two years engineering a dependency-graph recalculation engine that **only recomputed the exact cells affected by the change**, making Excel nearly ten times faster on complex financial models;
2. **Mouse-Driven WYSIWYG Formatting**: For the first time, analysts didn't have to memorize cryptic slash commands (`/WGC`). They could click and drag across cells, apply bold headers, draw borders, and print boardroom-ready financial statements directly.
Two years later, in **November 1987**, Microsoft launched **Excel 2.0 for Windows**. While an arrogant Lotus Development Corp. clung to DOS and fumbled its Windows transition until 1991, Excel swept corporate America. Within five years, Excel's market share surged past **70%**, dethroning Lotus and turning Windows itself into the mandatory corporate desktop OS.
| Spreadsheet Era & Contender | Launch | Core Technical Breakthrough | Ultimate Fate |
| :--- | :---: | :--- | :--- |
| **VisiCalc (The Pioneer)** | 1979 | Invented the A1 row-column grid and automatic recalculation on the Apple II | Unpatented and slow to adapt to the IBM PC; acquired by Lotus and discontinued |
| **Lotus 1-2-3 (The DOS King)** | 1983 | Hand-coded x86 assembly speed + integrated charting; owned 1980s Wall Street | Clung to DOS keyboard macros and missed the Windows GUI shift; sold to IBM in 1995 |
| **Microsoft Excel (The Hegemon)** | **1985** | **Minimal recalculation + GUI mouse selection + VBA + PivotTables + Turing-complete formulas** | **Ruled global business for 41 years; 1B+ users; anchor of Microsoft's $1T+ Office franchise** |
| **Google Sheets / Airtable** | 2006+ | Browser-native real-time multiplayer collaboration and cloud APIs | Won lightweight collaboration, but still bows to Excel on heavy financial modeling |
## 2. Why No SaaS Can Kill Excel: The Zero-Floor, Infinite-Ceiling Reactor
For product managers, the most fascinating question in enterprise software is simple: **why have forty years of ERP suites, BI dashboards, and low-code platforms failed to dislodge Excel?**
Because Excel achieved something almost no other software product has ever pulled off: it combined a **zero-friction floor** with a **Turing-complete ceiling**, turning a billion non-technical office workers into **functional, reactive programmers** without ever uttering the word "code."
Conventional enterprise software separates **state** from **logic**:
- The database lives hidden on a backend server;
- Engineers write rigid business logic in code;
- Users fill out locked forms on the front end. The moment a sales director wants to test a one-off tiered rebate for a single client, the software breaks and requires a two-week IT ticket.
Excel obliterated that boundary by making **data, interface, and logic occupy the exact same canvas**:
1. **A Floor of Zero**: Open a blank workbook and nothing forces you to define a schema, pick data types, or complete an onboarding wizard. Type `100` in a cell and it is a calculator; type names and it is a roster;
2. **An Infinite Ceiling**: The instant a user types an equals sign (`=`), they are writing declarative, reactive code. From `=SUM()` and `=VLOOKUP()` to **PivotTables** (1993), **VBA macros**, and the 2021 addition of recursive **`=LAMBDA()`** functions and native **Python in Excel**, Microsoft's formula language is officially **Turing-complete**. Engineers have built working ray-tracers and 16-bit CPUs entirely inside Excel formulas.
Real-world commerce runs on messy exceptions, midnight "what-if" scenarios, and ad-hoc workarounds. Rigid SaaS databases reject messiness; Excel absorbs it without complaint.
## 3. The Dark Side of Ubiquity: When Spreadsheets Rename Human Genes and Lose $6 Billion
When a tool becomes so dominant that humanity uses it as a database, a statistical package, and a mission-critical ledger all at once, its design quirks trigger historic disasters.
Excel's greatest UX flaw stems from its eagerness to guess what novice users mean—specifically its **silent automatic type conversion** and **lack of audit trails**:
1. **The Genetics War—When Scientists Renamed Human Genes to Appease Excel (2020)**: Twenty-seven human gene symbols look like calendar dates—most notably **`MARCH1`** (*Membrane Associated Ring-CH-Type Finger 1*) and **`SEPT2`** (*Septin 2*). Whenever researchers imported gene tables into Excel, Excel silently converted `MARCH1` into **`1-Mar`** and `SEPT2` into **`2-Sep`**, permanently corrupting the underlying numeric values. A landmark 2016 study in *Genome Biology* revealed that **19.6% of supplementary Excel files across leading genomics journals contained corrupted gene names**. Rather than waiting for Microsoft to change its defaults (which didn't happen until late 2023), the **HUGO Gene Nomenclature Committee (HGNC) surrendered in 2020 and officially renamed the human genes `MARCH1` to `MARCHF1` and `SEPT2` to `SEPTIN2`** so Excel would stop mangling them;
2. **JPMorgan's $6.2 Billion "London Whale" Loss (2012)**: A Value-at-Risk (VaR) model maintained in Excel relied on manual copy-pasting across sheets; a formula error divided by the **sum** of two days' volatility rather than their **average**, cutting perceived risk in half and contributing to a **$6.2 billion** trading loss;
3. **The UK's 15,841 Missing COVID-19 Cases (2020)**: Public Health England used an automated pipeline that wrote positive test results into legacy **`.xls` files** (capped at **65,536 rows**, unlike `.xlsx`'s 1,048,576 rows). Once the row limit was hit, **15,841 positive cases were silently dropped**, delaying contact tracing for tens of thousands of people.
## 4. Six-Dimension Breakdown: Why 80 Originality Still Ranks #25 in History
Under the unified six-dimension framework of *100 Products That Changed the World* (Originality 20%, Scale 20%, Impact 20%, Experience 15%, Business 15%, Durability 10%), Microsoft Excel scores as follows:
| Dimension | Weight | Score | Key Rationale |
| :--- | :---: | :---: | :--- |
| **Originality** | 20% | **80** | Dan Bricklin's VisiCalc (1979) invented the grid; Excel was the ruthless, GUI-first fast follower |
| **Scale** | 20% | **96** | Over 1 billion active users across every industry, currency, and language on earth |
| **Impact** | 20% | **93** | Democratized computational modeling for non-programmers and even forced human genetics to rewrite its nomenclature |
| **Experience** | 15% | **85** | Tactile grid immediacy and PivotTables are masterworks, offset by silent date-mangling and fragile nested formulas |
| **Business** | 15% | **92** | The indispensable crown jewel of Microsoft Office / 365, generating hundreds of billions in recurring profit |
| **Durability** | 10% | **97** | Unchallenged for 41 years; even generative AI agents aspire to be its Copilot rather than its replacement |
| **Overall (OVR)** | **100%** | **90.05** | **Ranked #25 Overall (right alongside #24 Honda Super Cub at 91.65 and #26 Aspirin at 90.10)** |
Today, in the era of frontier AI models, history is repeating itself. Generative AI isn't killing Excel—every AI lab from OpenAI and Anthropic to Microsoft and Tencent is racing to build agents whose #1 selling point is generating, cleaning, and auditing `.xlsx` files.
As long as human beings need a two-dimensional canvas to reconcile ambition with reality, the green grid born in 1985 will remain the undefeated mother tongue of business.
---
# 100 Product Managers Who Changed the World · #32: Ken Kutaragi
URL: https://doaipm.com/en/blog/pm-rank-32-ken-kutaragi/
Published: 2026-10-17
Tags: Product Managers, Ken Kutaragi, Sony, PlayStation, PS2, Nintendo, Gaming History
Inside Sony’s corporate headquarters in Tokyo during the late 1980s, an unspoken caste system ruled the hallways.
Engineers who built Trinitron televisions, Walkman cassette players, and broadcast cameras were the aristocracy. Mention the words **"video game console"** in an executive meeting, and the room would freeze in disdain:
**"Sony is the world’s premier high-technology audio-visual brand. Why on Earth would we stoop to making children’s toys to compete with a Kyoto playing-card peddler like Nintendo?!"**
Twenty years later, when televisions and portable audio players had shrunk into low-margin commodities, the single division keeping the entire Sony empire afloat — generating billions of dollars in operating profit — was that despised "toy": **PlayStation**.
And the man who forced it into existence against the nearly unanimous hostility of Sony’s board was a rebellious hardware engineer labeled a traitor, a lunatic, and a daydreamer by his own colleagues: **Ken Kutaragi**.
## The "Sony Traitor" Who Secretly Moonlit for Nintendo
Born in Tokyo in 1950 to parents who ran a small printing shop, Kutaragi spent his childhood taking apart clocks, radios, and printing presses after school.
Joining Sony’s digital research labs in 1975, he helped build early LCD displays, digital cameras, and the **System G** — a quarter-million-dollar real-time 3D graphics workstation used by television networks.
Then, in the mid-1980s, Kutaragi watched his young daughter sit mesmerized in front of the living-room TV playing Nintendo’s **Famicom (NES)**. Where other parents saw a distraction, Kutaragi saw the future of personal computing: **a dedicated graphics computer inside every home.**
What bothered him was the Famicom’s tinny, primitive 8-bit beeps.
Learning that Nintendo was developing its next-generation 16-bit console — the **Super Nintendo (SNES / Super Famicom)** — Kutaragi did something unthinkable in corporate Japan: **without telling his bosses at Sony**, he secretly accepted a contract from Nintendo to design the console’s sound processor in his spare time.
The result was the **SPC700**, an 8-channel digital audio chip that replaced arcade bleeps with lush, CD-quality orchestral music.
When Sony’s executives discovered that one of their brightest engineers had secretly built a crown-jewel chip for Nintendo, they were furious and moved to fire him on the spot.
He was saved by a single man: Sony CEO **Norio Ohga**, a former opera baritone who listened to the SPC700’s audio output, recognized its brilliance, and turned the scandal into a joint venture — tasking Kutaragi with building a Sony CD-ROM attachment for the Super Nintendo, codenamed the **"Play Station."**
## The Humiliation in Chicago, 1991: "Do We Just Stand Down?!"
By mid-1991, Kutaragi’s team had built a working hybrid console that played both Super Nintendo cartridges and Sony CD-ROMs.
Behind the scenes, however, Nintendo’s ruthless president **Hiroshi Yamauchi** read the fine print of the original 1988 contract and realized a fatal trap: Sony held sole licensing rights over every game published on the CD-ROM format.
Yamauchi decided to execute a public ambush.
At the **June 1991 Consumer Electronics Show (CES)** in Chicago:
- **On Day 1**: Sony proudly took the stage and unveiled the Nintendo-Sony **"Play Station"** to the world press;
- **Less than 24 hours later, on Day 2**: Nintendo held its own press conference next door, never mentioned Sony once, and announced to a stunned room of journalists that **Nintendo had dumped Sony to partner with Sony’s arch-rival, Philips!**
Japanese business newspapers ran front-page headlines calling it **"Sony’s Humiliation."**
Back in Tokyo, Sony’s old-guard executives demanded that the gaming project be buried forever. In a tense boardroom showdown with CEO Norio Ohga, 41-year-old Kutaragi stepped forward and asked the question that changed entertainment history:
> **"Nintendo just slapped Sony across the face in front of the entire world. Are we simply going to tuck our tails and retreat?! If we walk away now, Sony forfeits the digital future forever!"**
Ohga — an operatic alpha who despised losing — slammed his fist onto the table: **"Do it! Spin Kutaragi’s team out into Sony Music, give him 5 billion yen, and build our own machine to crush them!"**
## Real-Time 3D Polygons + $1 CDs: Dismantling the Cartridge Monopoly
Exiled to a separate building in Aoyama with a ragtag team of musicians and misfits, Kutaragi engineered a two-pronged product revolution that caught Nintendo completely flat-footed:
| Strategic Dimension | Nintendo’s Legacy Playbook (SNES / N64) | **Kutaragi’s PlayStation (PS1) Architecture** | Why It Shattered the Industry |
|---|---|---|---|
| **Graphics Architecture** | Traditional 2D sprites (and texture-starved N64 later) | **Dedicated real-time 3D polygon engine (360,000 polygons/sec)** | Brought arcade hits like *Tekken*, *Ridge Racer*, and *Final Fantasy VII* home |
| **Storage Medium** | Expensive silicon ROM cartridges (**8MB–64MB**) | **Standard CD-ROM discs (660MB — 10x to 80x larger!)** | Enabled full-motion CG cinema cutscenes and CD-quality symphonic soundtracks |
| **Manufacturing Cost & Lead Time** | **$12–$15 per cartridge**, 8-week factory lead time | **$0.80–$1.00 per CD**, 7-day restock turnaround | Eliminated inventory bankruptcy risk for third-party studios; Square & Enix defected |
| **Brand & Cultural Identity** | Family-friendly toy for kids under 12 | **Edgy, aspirational hardware for 18–35 adults (△ ○ × □ icons)** | Elevated video games from the children’s bedroom into global pop culture |
Launched in Japan on December 3, 1994, the original **PlayStation** became the **first home console in history to ship over 100 million units (102.4M)**.
Then, in 2000, Kutaragi pulled off an even bolder masterstroke with the **PlayStation 2 (PS2)**: at a time when standalone DVD movie players cost $400 to $500, he built a full **DVD player** directly into the PS2 and priced the entire console at **$299**.
Millions of households bought a PS2 as their family’s first DVD player, turning Sony’s console into the Trojan horse that standardized DVD video worldwide. **The PS2 went on to sell over 160 million units — still the best-selling home video game console in human history.**
## Six-Dimension Score Breakdown
In the *100 Product Managers Who Changed the World* framework, Ken Kutaragi earns a weighted overall score of **90.30** (displayed as **90**), tying with Marc Andreessen (#31) and ranking **#32** overall:
### 1. Vision: 94 (Highest Dimension)
In 1989, when everyone else saw consoles as cheap plastic toys, Kutaragi saw that real-time 3D graphics workstations would enter the living room through gaming first. His bets on 3D polygons (PS1) and DVD convergence (PS2) were each five years ahead of the industry curve.
### 2. Originality: 93
From the SNES SPC700 audio chip and the PS1’s 3D geometry engine to the iconic **△ (Viewpoint), ○ (Yes), × (No), □ (Sheet/Menu)** controller language (designed with Teiyu Goto) and the PS3’s heterogeneous **Cell broadband processor**, Kutaragi repeatedly invented new hardware paradigms from scratch.
### 3. Scale: 90
Across the first three generations he personally architected (PS1 at 102M, PS2 at 160M, PS3 at 87M, plus 80M PSP handhelds), his hardware shipped more than **430 million units**, laying the foundation for a PlayStation ecosystem that has now surpassed **550 million consoles** worldwide.
### 4. Taste: 88 & Business: 88
He gave PlayStation a cool, mature, futuristic aesthetic — from the hauntingly resonant PS1 boot chime to the monolithic black vertical tower of the PS2. Commercially, his decision to replace $15 proprietary cartridges with $1 CD-ROMs rewrote the unit economics of game publishing and turned SCE into Sony’s profit engine.
### 5. Insight: 86 (Lowest Dimension)
Like many uncompromising hardware visionaries, Kutaragi’s greatest strength eventually became his blind spot. High on the triumph of PS1 and PS2, he over-engineered the **PlayStation 3 (2006)** with the notoriously difficult-to-program Cell processor and an expensive Blu-ray drive, launching at a punishing **$599**. When consumers balked at the price, Kutaragi infamously remarked that people would "work more hours to buy one" — a lapse in consumer empathy that allowed Nintendo’s Satoru Iwata (#35) to blindside Sony with the $250 **Wii**.
## Epilogue
On that June morning in Chicago in 1991, when Nintendo left Sony humiliated on stage in front of the global press, every rational executive in Tokyo wanted to bury the PlayStation name forever.
Ken Kutaragi refused to back down — and in doing so, proved that **the greatest products inside giant corporations are rarely born from boardroom consensus; they are forged by the stubbornness of a single rebel who refuses to let the future die.**
---
# 100 Products That Changed the World · #24: Honda Super Cub
URL: https://doaipm.com/en/blog/product-rank-24-honda-super-cub/
Published: 2026-10-17
Tags: Great Products, Honda Super Cub, Soichiro Honda, Motorcycles, Industrial Design, Manufacturing, Tech History
If someone asked you to name **the most-produced motor vehicle in human history**, what would you guess?
Most people immediately think of Henry Ford’s **Model T** (15 million built), the **Volkswagen Beetle** (21.5 million), or the reigning king of four-wheeled passenger cars, the **Toyota Corolla** (roughly 50+ million).
The true #1 outsold all three of those automotive legends combined.
Since August 1958, across more than 160 countries, humanity has built over **110 million (110,000,000+) units** of a single machine.
When the British television show *Top Gear* tried to kill one — draining its engine oil, filling the crankcase with used cooking grease from a fish-and-chips fryer, loading it with concrete bags, and finally **dropping it off the roof of a 21-meter (70-foot) building onto concrete** — the battered little machine started right up with a kick and rode away.
It is the AK-47 of two-wheelers, the machine that put half of Asia on wheels: **the Honda Super Cub**.
## A Bowl of Buckwheat Noodles and the Ultimate Product Brief: "Rideable With One Hand!"
Travel back to Japan in 1956.
**Soichiro Honda** (#19) and his business partner **Takeo Fujisawa** had built a promising young motorcycle company, yet two-wheelers everywhere suffered from the same glaring problem: they were noisy, smoky, greasy contraptions built either by strapping crude two-stroke motors onto bicycle frames or by building heavy, intimidating machines for leather-jacketed enthusiasts.
Riding a motorcycle required squeezing a stiff left-hand clutch lever while coordinating a foot shifter and throttle — a daunting ritual for novices — while exposed chains flung hot grease onto the rider’s trousers.
After a month-long research trip observing scooters and mopeds in Germany and Austria in late 1956, Fujisawa sat down with Soichiro Honda and laid out one of the most brilliant **Product Requirements Documents (PRDs)** in industrial history:
1. **A housewife in a skirt must be able to mount and ride it with grace** (no swinging a leg high over a gas tank, and zero oil stains on stockings);
2. **It must be quiet, clean, frugal, and strong** (a high-revving 4-stroke engine rather than a smoky 2-stroke);
3. **And the legendary third requirement: "A soba noodle delivery boy must be able to ride it through Tokyo traffic with one hand while carrying a stacked tray of noodle bowls on his other shoulder!"**
Honda’s engineers stared at him in disbelief: **If the rider’s left hand is holding a tower of noodle bowls, how on Earth is he supposed to pull the clutch lever on the left handlebar to shift gears?!**
Refusing to compromise on the soba-delivery scenario, Soichiro Honda and his engineers spent eighteen months inventing a package of mechanical breakthroughs that defined a new vehicle category:
- **The Automatic Centrifugal Clutch**: They eliminated the left-hand clutch lever entirely! Linked directly to a 3-speed foot pedal, the centrifugal clutch engaged automatically as engine RPM rose and disengaged the instant the rider pressed the foot shifter — **making one-handed, stall-free riding effortless**;
- **Step-Through Spine Frame & Polyethylene Leg Shield**: Moving the fuel tank beneath the hinged seat created a low step-through chassis anyone could mount in a skirt, while a white injection-molded polyethylene fairing shielded the rider’s legs from mud, wind, and engine heat;
- **The 9,500-RPM 50cc Four-Stroke Engine**: At a time when skeptics believed a tiny 50cc 4-stroke couldn’t pull a bicycle uphill, Honda wrung **4.5 horsepower** out of a jewel-like overhead-valve single that delivered over **100 kilometers per liter (235+ mpg)**.
## America, 1963: "You Meet the Nicest People on a Honda"
Launched in Japan in August 1958, the **Super Cub C100** was an instant sensation at home.
When Honda expanded to the United States in 1959, however, it hit a cultural wall. In post-war America, motorcycles were synonymous with Marlon Brando in *The Wild One* and outlaw biker gangs like the Hells Angels. Total US motorcycle sales hovered at a tiny **50,000 units a year**, and middle-class parents wouldn’t let their kids near a bike dealership.
Worse still, Honda’s larger twin-cylinder motorcycles initially suffered oil leaks and clutch failures on long American freeways.
While waiting for replacement parts from Tokyo, Honda’s young Japanese staff in Los Angeles began riding the tiny **50cc Super Cub** on errands around town and up into the Santa Monica hills.
Everywhere they parked, ordinary Americans — college students, surfers, housewives — stopped them on the sidewalk to ask where they could buy that friendly, toy-like little red-and-white machine.
In 1963, seizing on a concept originally drafted by a UCLA advertising student, Honda bypassed traditional motorcycle magazines entirely and bought full-page color spreads in *Life* magazine with a slogan that rewrote marketing history:
> **"You Meet the Nicest People on a Honda."**
The ads showed zero leather jackets and zero grease: just sun-drenched illustrations of college students, mothers and daughters, and Santa Claus riding the Super Cub through suburban neighborhoods.
| Product & Cultural Dimension | Motorcycles Before 1958 | **The Honda Super Cub Paradigm** | Global Impact |
|---|---|---|---|
| **Operating Barrier** | Manual left-hand clutch + foot shift; easy to stall | **Automatic centrifugal clutch — rideable one-handed** | Unlocked riding for housewives, students, seniors, and delivery couriers |
| **Cleanliness & Comfort** | Exposed greasy chains, smoky 2-stroke exhaust | **Fully enclosed chain case + plastic leg shield + clean 4-stroke** | Riders could commute in office suits or skirts without a speck of oil |
| **Mechanical Reliability** | Finicky carburetors and fragile electronics | **Bulletproof 50cc 4-stroke that runs on anything** | Multi-generational family workhorse across 160+ countries |
| **Cultural Identity** | Outlaw biker subculture | **"You Meet the Nicest People" + 110M+ units built** | **First vehicle in Japan granted a national 3D Shape Trademark** |
Instead of fighting Harley-Davidson for a slice of 50,000 hardcore bikers, the Super Cub created an ocean of millions of first-time riders. By 1964, **nearly one out of every two motorcycles sold in America was a Honda**, and The Beach Boys even recorded a hit song about it (*"Little Honda"*).
## Becoming the Everyday Legs of Asia
If the Super Cub charmed suburban America, it completely transformed the socioeconomic fabric of **Southeast and East Asia**.
Across Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Taiwan, the Super Cub and its underbone descendants became the literal legs of hundreds of millions of families. In Vietnam, the word **"xe Honda"** became the generic noun for *any* motorbike — carrying families of four to school, hauling towers of produce to market, and powering the small-business economy of entire nations for sixty years.
In 2014, the Japan Patent Office bestowed a rare honor on the Super Cub: **registering its physical silhouette as a protected 3D Trademark** — the first vehicle in Japanese history recognized as unmistakable by shape alone, even without a badge.
## Six-Dimension Score Breakdown
In the *100 Products That Changed the World* framework, the Honda Super Cub earns a weighted overall score of **91.65** (displayed as **92**), ranking **#24** overall right behind the safety elevator (#23):
### 1. Durability: 97 (Highest Dimension)
A 97 in both senses of the word: continuously manufactured for **68 years (1958–2026)** with its fundamental ergonomics intact, and famous for a mechanical indestructibility that survived being dropped off a seven-story building on *Top Gear*.
### 2. Scale: 95
With **more than 110 million units built**, it is the most-produced motor vehicle in the history of planet Earth — democratizing personal mobility for billions of people priced out of four-wheeled cars.
### 3. Experience: 92
Fujisawa’s "one-handed soba delivery boy + woman in a skirt" brief remains one of the greatest masterclasses in user empathy ever executed. The centrifugal clutch, enclosed chain guard, 17-inch wheels (sized to roll smoothly over unpaved gravel roads), and step-through frame solved real human friction at every touchpoint.
### 4. Business: 90
The Super Cub bankrolled Honda’s expansion into a global automotive titan, while its 1963 *Nicest People* campaign remains Harvard Business School’s canonical case study on blue-ocean market creation.
### 5. Originality: 88 & Impact: 88
While it did not invent the internal combustion engine, it created the entire **underbone motorcycle** category and erased the gender and social barriers of motorized transport — becoming the tireless mechanical heartbeat of Asian urbanization.
## Epilogue
In 1958, when Soichiro Honda crouched on a factory floor in Saitama chalking the curve of a white plastic leg shield so a housewife’s skirt wouldn’t catch a splash of mud, he wasn’t trying to build a status symbol.
Sixty-eight years and 110 million machines later, exotic supercars gather dust in climate-controlled garages — while the little 50cc bike built for a soba noodle delivery boy still kicks to life every morning at dawn, carrying humanity to work.
---
# 100 Product Managers Who Changed the World · #31: Marc Andreessen
URL: https://doaipm.com/en/blog/pm-rank-31-marc-andreessen/
Published: 2026-10-16
Tags: Product Managers, Marc Andreessen, Netscape, Mosaic, Web Browser, a16z, Silicon Valley
In the winter of 1992, inside a basement lab at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, a 21-year-old undergraduate earning **$6.85 an hour** stared at a Unix workstation.
Tim Berners-Lee had already invented the World Wide Web at CERN, yet fewer than a hundred thousand people on Earth actually used it — almost all of them particle physicists and computer science professors.
Why didn’t ordinary human beings care about the internet?
The 6-foot-5 student from Wisconsin, **Marc Andreessen**, saw the bottleneck immediately: the early internet was a forbidding desert of command-line text. Reading a document required memorizing arcane protocols; viewing a photograph meant downloading a separate binary file and launching an external image viewer. Text and images could not even coexist inside the same window.
"If the Web remains rows of monochrome academic directories," Andreessen realized, "it will stay a toy for university faculty forever."
Teaming up with NCSA staff programmer Eric Bina and fueled by late-night Mountain Dew and Nabisco Sugar Wafers, Andreessen spent three months coding around the clock. In January 1993, they released a compact piece of software that detonated across human history: **NCSA Mosaic**.
## A Single `![]()
` Tag: Giving the Internet a Face
Reviewed through the lens of modern product management, three decisions Andreessen made at age twenty-two defined how humanity would interact with information for the next thirty years:
1. **Inventing the inline `![]()
` tag**:
Before Mosaic, HTML had hyperlinks, not magazine-style layouts. Ignoring purists who complained that pictures would clog academic backbones, Andreessen proposed and shipped the `![]()
` tag — **allowing color photographs and text paragraphs to render side by side on the same page for the first time**. When newspaper editors and merchants saw a webpage that looked like a living magazine, the commercial potential of the Web became self-evident overnight;
2. **Point-and-click simplicity**:
He replaced terminal commands with underlined hypertext links and a clean toolbar featuring the **Back** and **Forward** buttons that billions of people still click by muscle memory today;
3. **Cross-platform, free distribution**:
While earlier browsers ran only on expensive NeXT or Unix workstations, Andreessen insisted on shipping Mosaic for everyday **Windows PCs and Apple Macs**, downloadable for free by anyone.
Within twelve months of Mosaic’s release, global Web traffic exploded by **more than 10,000%**.
Andreessen did not invent the underlying pipes of the internet, but he did something equally transformative in product history: **he gave the internet a graphical face that ordinary people could understand at a glance.**
## Netscape and the Browser Wars: Losing the Battle, Winning the Modern Web
In 1994, fresh out of college, Andreessen flew to Silicon Valley and teamed up with legendary entrepreneur Jim Clark to found **Mosaic Communications** — soon renamed **Netscape**.
Rewriting the browser from scratch as **Netscape Navigator**, Andreessen made another brilliant user-experience call tailored to the brutal reality of 14.4 kbps dial-up modems:
Earlier browsers waited until an entire webpage and all its images finished downloading before drawing anything on screen, leaving users staring at a blank white window for a full minute. Andreessen insisted on **progressive rendering ("on-the-fly layout")** — painting the text immediately so users could start reading and clicking links while images filled in progressively line by line.
Within months, Netscape captured **over 80% of the global browser market**.
On August 9, 1995 — just sixteen months after incorporation and without a dime of profit — Netscape went public on NASDAQ. Its stock soared from $28 to $75 on day one, valuing the young company at **$2.9 billion**. **A barefoot 24-year-old Marc Andreessen graced the cover of *Time* magazine, firing the starting gun for the global dot-com boom.**
Netscape’s meteoric rise woke up Microsoft’s Bill Gates (#8). In late 1995, Gates issued his famous *Internet Tidal Wave* memo and bundled **Internet Explorer** free inside every copy of Windows.
Crushed by Microsoft’s operating-system distribution monopoly in the First Browser War, Netscape was eventually acquired by AOL in 1998 for $4.2 billion.
Yet viewed from thirty years later, the product seeds Andreessen planted at Netscape ended up ruling the modern digital world:
- **JavaScript**: Convinced that the browser should become an application platform rather than a static document viewer, Andreessen hired Brendan Eich in 1995 to create **JavaScript** in ten frantic days — the language that powers virtually every interactive website on Earth today;
- **SSL / HTTPS & Cookies**: To make online shopping possible, Netscape engineered the **Secure Sockets Layer (SSL)** protocol (complete with the browser padlock icon) and HTTP **Cookies**, laying the technical foundation for trillions of dollars in global e-commerce;
- **Open-Sourcing Mozilla**: In early 1998, before handing the keys to AOL, Netscape open-sourced its entire codebase as the **Mozilla Project** — the phoenix that later gave birth to Firefox and kept the open Web alive until Chrome arrived.
## "Software Is Eating the World" — The Man Who Funds Product Builders
After Netscape, Andreessen proved he was no one-hit wonder by co-founding data-center automation pioneer Opsware (acquired by Hewlett-Packard for **$1.65 billion** in 2007). Then, in 2009, he and longtime partner Ben Horowitz launched **Andreessen Horowitz (a16z)**.
They redesigned venture capital itself as a product: replacing suited financiers with battle-tested technical founder-CEOs backed by a full-service operating platform for recruiting, marketing, and enterprise sales.
On August 20, 2011, while Wall Street was still shell-shocked from the 2008 financial crisis, Andreessen published his famous essay in *The Wall Street Journal*: **"Why Software Is Eating the World."**
> **"Every company in every industry needs to assume that a software revolution is coming... In the next 10 years, iconic silicon-valley style software companies are going to overturn every traditional industry on Earth."**
Backing that thesis with over $40 billion in assets under management, he went on to fund Facebook, Twitter, GitHub, Instagram, Airbnb, Stripe, Coinbase, and today’s frontier AI wave from **OpenAI and Mistral to Cursor and ElevenLabs**.
## Six-Dimension Score Breakdown
In the *100 Product Managers Who Changed the World* framework, Marc Andreessen earns a weighted overall score of **90.30** (displayed as **90**), ranking **#31** overall right behind Demis Hassabis (#30):
| Dimension | Weight | Marc Andreessen Score | Key Rationale & Milestone Evidence |
|---|---:|---:|---|
| **Originality** | 15% | **96** | Co-created the inline-image graphical browser (Mosaic); catalyzed JavaScript, SSL/HTTPS, Cookies, and open-source Mozilla at Netscape |
| **Vision** | 20% | **95** | Predicted in 1995 that the browser would replace the OS (proven by SaaS/cloud 20 years later); penned *Software Is Eating the World* in 2011 |
| **Scale** | 15% | **92** | Netscape commanded 80%+ of the early Web; the graphical browser paradigm he defined now serves 5+ billion internet users daily |
| **Insight** | 20% | **85** | Saw immediately that inline images and progressive loading would unlock mass consumer adoption; underestimated OS-level bundling moats |
| **Business** | 15% | **85** | Netscape’s 1995 IPO invented modern tech capital markets; $1.65B Opsware exit; built a16z into Silicon Valley’s premier VC powerhouse |
| **Taste** | 15% | **82** | Championed move-fast, ship-everything engineering pragmatism over minimalist restraint (famously birthing the `