Intellect PlusBusiness stories
479 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 7 of 8.
Aryna Sabalenka skipped the junior Grand Slams and still reached world No. 1Aryna Sabalenka took up tennis because her father, an ice hockey player, spotted some courts while driving through Minsk and stopped. She never played a junior Grand Slam, peaked …
Xbox's new chief once pictured herself as team doctor for the Green Bay PackersAsha Sharma grew up in Racine, Wisconsin, worked on a golf course as a teenager and imagined a future in sports medicine. Instead she climbed through Microsoft, Facebook and Insta…
Cotton turned Ashton-under-Lyne from damp farmland into a booming mill townUntil cotton arrived in 1769, Ashton-under-Lyne was dismissed as soggy, barren land of little value. Within a century mills, canals and railways had multiplied its population more…
An accidental button press set off the fatal dive of Atlas Air Flight 3591About 29 seconds after the flaps began moving on its approach to Houston, something switched the cargo jet's go-around mode on by accident, and the engines surged toward climb pow…
Steve Jobs never planned an App Store until developers pushed backWhen Apple unveiled the iPhone in 2007, Steve Jobs told outside developers to build web apps for Safari rather than native software. Their backlash changed his mind, a toolkit fol…
Apple designs its own chips but has never owned a factory to make themEvery Apple chip, from the iPhone's processor to the M1 that moved the Mac off Intel, is designed in-house and built by someone else, first Samsung and later TSMC. Apple even sell…
Apple's streaming service gave itself away for years before winning Best PictureWhen Apple TV+ launched on 1 November 2019 at $4.99 a month, Apple handed a free year to anyone buying a new iPhone, iPad or Mac, then stretched that giveaway twice more to July 2…
Zomato ditched its first name, FoodieBay, partly to avoid a fight with eBayIn 2008 two Bain & Company consultants, Deepinder Goyal and Pankaj Chaddah, launched a restaurant-listing site called FoodieBay. Two years later they renamed it Zomato, partly bec…
At 15, Zlatan Ibrahimović nearly quit football for a job at Malmö's portAs a teenager Zlatan Ibrahimović came close to abandoning football to work at the Port of Malmö, until his coach talked him out of it. He went on to win 34 trophies, score more th…
Yoko Ono made a painting that visitors finished with their feetAt a Manhattan loft in 1960 and 1961, Yoko Ono laid a scrap of canvas on the floor and called it Painting to Be Stepped On. It became complete only as people walked across it, lea…
Why KFC and Taco Bell are locked into pouring Pepsi foreverWhen PepsiCo spun off its fast food chains in 1997, it attached a permanent string: the new company must serve Pepsi rather than Coca-Cola in its restaurants, with a few exception…
Zara Larsson went from child talent-show winner to owning her catalogueIn 2022 Zara Larsson left the Swedish label that had signed her at 15 and acquired her own music catalogue. Her next album, Venus, came out in 2024 on her own imprint, Sommer Hous…
A pediatrician rebuilt young Pete Sampras's backhand with Wimbledon in mindPeter Fischer was a children's doctor and tennis enthusiast who coached the teenage Sampras until 1989. He had the boy abandon his two-handed backhand for a one-handed stroke, rea…
The Petronas Towers were shifted 61 metres off a buried cliffTest boreholes under the old Kuala Lumpur racecourse revealed an unpleasant surprise: the planned footprint straddled the edge of an underground cliff, half decayed limestone and …- Phil Knight sketched Nike's business plan in a Stanford class paperFor a small-business course at Stanford, Phil Knight wrote a paper asking whether Japanese sports shoes could do to German brands what Japanese cameras had done to German cameras.…
Yahoo passed on buying Google for one million dollarsIn 1998 Larry Page and Sergey Brin offered their young search engine to Yahoo for $1 million, and Yahoo said no. Four years later it tried again, negotiating for weeks before sett…- Coca-Cola had three chances to buy Pepsi and turned down every oneBetween 1922 and 1933, while Pepsi lurched through bankruptcy and changes of owner, Coca-Cola was offered the company three separate times. It said no each time. Within a few deca…
- The Xbox 360 sold out despite starting production 69 days before launchMicrosoft began building the Xbox 360 only 69 days before its November 2005 debut. Stock vanished at once everywhere except Japan, and 40,000 units, a tenth of the supply, turned …
Microsoft built the first Xbox from PC parts and lost billionsBill Gates feared Sony's PlayStation 2 might replace the home computer. His response was the Xbox, a console assembled largely from ordinary PC components, with a built-in hard dr…
How Microsoft's game studio bought Halo, Minecraft and moreHalo was originally planned as a computer game. Then in June 2000 Microsoft bought its developer, Bungie, and turned it into the flagship launch title for the first Xbox. That pur…
The Xbox One reversed so many plans it was nicknamed the Xbox 180Microsoft unveiled the Xbox One in May 2013 and spent over 30 minutes on television features before showing a single game. Worse news followed: plans for daily online check-ins an…
The Xbox Series X was shaped by heat, Tetris-style packing and a fanMicrosoft wanted its 2020 flagship console to have twice the graphics power and four times the processor speed of the Xbox One X while staying just as quiet. The parts would draw …- Windows 10 was called the last Windows, then came Windows 11In 2015 a Microsoft employee told a conference audience that no Windows would follow Windows 10. Six years later Microsoft unveiled Windows 11, ending the longest gap ever between…
Windows 7 won back the users that Vista had driven awayWindows Vista launched to complaints about sluggish performance, hardware that would not work and endless security prompts. Microsoft's answer was not a radical reinvention but a …- Windows XP was born when two failed projects mergedBy early 2000 Microsoft had two operating systems in the works, one for homes and one for offices, and both had grown too ambitious. It scrapped them for a single project called W…
- The Houston Comets won the first four WNBA titles in a rowWhen the WNBA tipped off in June 1997, its marketing leaned on Rebecca Lobo, Lisa Leslie and Sheryl Swoopes. Yet the first real star was Cynthia Cooper of the Houston Comets. With…
Twitter began as twttr, a side project inside a podcast companyBefore it was X, and before it was even Twitter, the service was called twttr. The vowel-free name, credited to co-founder Noah Glass, echoed Flickr and the five-digit text messag…- The wiki got its name from a Honolulu airport shuttle busWard Cunningham needed a name for his editable website and remembered an airport counter worker in Honolulu telling him to catch the Wiki Wiki Shuttle between terminals. Wiki is H…
- A teacher on maternity leave built Russia's largest online shopIn 2004 a 28-year-old English teacher on maternity leave in Moscow found it nearly impossible to shop for clothes with a newborn at home. Tatyana Kim started selling them online f…
- Why Microsoft jumped from Windows 8 straight to Windows 10Microsoft never released a Windows 9. Executives said the new system was too big a leap for that number, and joked that Windows One was taken because Windows 1.0 already existed. …
- Vietnam's national car brand hit a 23 billion dollar valuation on few salesWhen VinFast began trading on Nasdaq in August 2023, its shares soared so high that the young Vietnamese carmaker briefly looked worth more than several established global automak…
- Virgil van Dijk went from teenage dishwasher to a 75 million pound defenderAs a teenager at Willem II's academy, Virgil van Dijk washed dishes part-time because he had no contract and needed money. The club decided he had too many limitations and let him…
A VPN hides your traffic from your internet provider, not from everyoneConsumer VPN services are often sold as a cloak of anonymity, but the technology was never built to make anyone unidentifiable. It wraps data in an encrypted tunnel so your intern…
How Microsoft's free code editor went from 13th place to top in two yearsIn Stack Overflow's 2016 developer survey, Visual Studio Code ranked 13th among popular tools, used by just 7 percent of respondents. Two years later it was number one, and by 202…
After the war, nobody wanted the Volkswagen factory as a giftIn 1945 the bombed Volkswagen works could have been carted off as war reparations, yet no British carmaker wanted it. A British report judged the car unattractive and commercially…- Travis Scott went from sleeping on couches to running his own labelAfter dropping out of university to chase music, Jacques Webster slept on a friend's floor in New York, was stranded in Los Angeles, and was cut off by his parents. Then the rappe…
- Twitch began as a side category and ended up swallowing its parentJustin.tv was a general streaming site with many categories, but one kept outgrowing the rest: people watching other people play video games. In 2011 the founders spun gaming off …
A font and a typeface are not the same thing, and the difference is metalPeople use font and typeface interchangeably, but typographers do not. A typeface is a design, such as Times. A font was originally a physical box of metal letters in one size and…- Some places belong to no town at all, from Danish islands to Dutch poldersAlmost all of Denmark is divided into municipalities, except a tiny cluster of islands in the Baltic that has been run by the military since 1685. Places like that are unincorpora…
USB set out to tidy the back of the PC and replaced nearly every portIn the mid-1990s, the back of a personal computer bristled with different sockets: serial, parallel, game and more, each needing its own fiddly setup. Seven companies set out to r…- Valve made its fortune selling other people's games, not only its ownValve became famous for Half-Life, a game that split the history of first-person shooters into before and after. Yet most of its money came from a storefront it built partly to es…
- Vegemite flopped at first, and a pun-based rebrand only made it worseAustralia's most famous spread began as brewery waste and sold poorly for years. Its makers even renamed it Parwill to run the slogan Marmite but Parwill: if Ma might, then Pa wil…
Victoria Azarenka left Minsk at 15 and became Belarus's first major championAt 15, Victoria Azarenka left Minsk to live and train in Scottsdale, Arizona, helped by an ice hockey goalie whose wife was a friend of her mother. Within seven years she was the …- Vince Carter turned a struggling Canadian team into must-see basketballVince Carter was offered a college scholarship for playing the saxophone, and in high school he dominated volleyball. He chose basketball instead, and ended up playing NBA games a…
- How a $6.6 billion buyout helped sink Toys R UsBy 2017 Toys R Us owed about $5 billion and was spending $400 million a year just servicing that debt, leaving little to modernise its stores against Amazon and Walmart. The debt …
Before running Laika, Travis Knight made a rap album as Chilly TeeThe man who now heads Laika, the stop-motion studio behind Coraline, first tried his luck in hip-hop. Recording as Chilly Tee, Travis Knight caught the ear of producer Hank Shockl…
Toyota's Celica was Japan's answer to the Ford MustangFord had shown that a stylish coupé body on ordinary sedan mechanicals could sell by the boatload. In 1970 Toyota tried the same recipe for American buyers, and the Celica, named …
The Corolla overtook the Beetle in 1997 and has never looked backMore than 54 million Corollas have been sold since 1966, making it the best-selling car nameplate of all time, a title it took from the Volkswagen Beetle in 1997. Its name is Lati…- Toyota's first American export limped out of steam before Las VegasIn 1958 Toyota shipped its Crown sedan to California, confident after rave reviews at home. Built for muddy, slow Japanese roads, the car struggled on interstate highways. A publi…
- How the Toyota Hilux slipped past America's chicken taxImported pickups faced a 25 percent American tariff, but Toyota found a gap. From 1971 it shipped the Hilux without a cargo bed, paid just 4 percent on the cab and chassis, and ha…
A Jeep lookalike became the Land Cruiser after climbing Mount FujiIn July 1951 a Toyota test driver named Ichiro Taira steered a prototype off-roader to the sixth stage of Mount Fuji, higher than any vehicle had reached. Japan's National Police …- The Land Cruiser Prado once swapped its wheels for rubber tracksIn late 1999 Toyota sold a Prado with triangular rubber crawler units instead of wheels, built for carrying people and cargo through deep snow. Because the controls were unchanged…
Toyota's RAV4 invented a vehicle class and then dethroned the F-150For nearly four decades the Ford F-150 pickup was America's top-selling vehicle. In February 2025 a small Toyota crossover took its place. The RAV4, often called the first modern …
For five years, America's Toyota Yaris was secretly a MazdaBuy a Yaris sedan in the United States between 2015 and 2020 and you drove home a lightly restyled Mazda2 from a Mazda factory in Mexico. Toyota's small car wore many faces worldw…
Why so many Toyota names secretly mean crownCamry comes from kanmuri, the Japanese word for crown. That is no accident: Toyota has spent decades naming key cars after crowns and royal regalia, from the Crown itself to the C…- Before the Senate, Ted Cruz was a champion college debaterIn 1992 a Princeton student named Rafael Cruz won top speaker at both the US and North American debating championships and was named national speaker of the year. Princeton later …
- The self-published book that ranked Muhammad as history's most influential personIn 1978 an American astrophysicist, Michael Hart, published a list of the hundred people who most changed the course of history, printed by his father's publishing house. He put t…
- The Times of India once ran an obituary for democracy itselfThe day after Indira Gandhi declared a state of emergency in June 1975, the Bombay edition of the Times of India carried a death notice for one D.E.M. O'Cracy, husband of T. Ruth …
- Tim Cook ignored logic to join a struggling Apple in 1998In early 1998 Tim Cook had a comfortable job at Compaq, and everyone who knew him advised staying put. Five minutes into an interview with Steve Jobs he changed his mind. Apple wa…
TKO put scripted wrestling and real cage fighting under one companyOne stages choreographed storylines; the other began as a nearly rule-free contest to find the most effective martial art. In September 2023 WWE and the UFC merged into TKO Group …