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Wealth & Business

882 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 10 of 15.

541. 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 …
542. 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…
543. 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…
544. 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…
545. 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…
546. 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…
547. 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. …
548. 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…
549. 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…
550. 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…
551. 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…
552. 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…
553. 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…
554. 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 …
555. 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…
556. 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…
557. 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…
558. 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…
559. 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…
560. 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 …
561. 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…
562. 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 …
563. 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…
564. 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 …
565. 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…
566. 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…
567. 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…
568. 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 …
569. 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…
570. 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 …
571. 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…
572. 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…
573. 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 …
574. 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…
575. 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 …
576. 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…
577. 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 …
578. Tom Brokaw was the first English-language reporter on the Berlin Wall's fallOn November 9, 1989, an East German spokesman fumbled through his notes at a press conference and said new travel rules applied immediately. East Berliners rushed the Wall. Tom Br…
579. TNA Wrestling was dreamed up on a fishing trip to rival WWEWhen World Championship Wrestling collapsed in 2001, WWE was left with the American wrestling business to itself. On a fishing trip, Jeff Jarrett, his father Jerry and Bob Ryder s…
580. Golf's Tour Championship once gave its leader a head startFor six seasons the PGA Tour's finale began before anyone hit a shot: the points leader teed off at ten under par, while the last qualifiers started at even. The idea, borrowed fr…
581. Taipei 101 stands tall beside a fault line by bending, not resistingTaipei 101 rises 508 metres just 200 metres from a major fault line, in a region lashed by typhoons. Its engineers designed it to ride out winds of 60 metres per second and the st…
582. The small New York publisher that bought its way into Grand Theft AutoTake-Two Interactive began in 1993 as a tiny publisher betting on video games that starred real actors, including Dennis Hopper. A few years later it scooped up the assets of a co…
583. Starbucks spent its first decade refusing to sell a cup of coffeeWhen Starbucks opened near Seattle's Pike Place Market in 1971, it sold beans and brewing gear, nothing you could drink. Its founders wanted to stay that way. It took a marketing …
584. Before hosting Family Feud, Steve Harvey slept in his car for three yearsIn the late 1980s a struggling comic named Steve Harvey went three years without a home, sleeping in his car between gigs and washing at gas stations and public pools. Decades lat…
585. No university wanted Steve Nash until one coach watched a highlight tapeHis high school coach mailed letters and highlight reels to more than 30 American universities, and not one recruited him. Then Santa Clara's coach asked for footage, saw the Cana…
586. Stranger Things built a Netflix empire out of 1980s nostalgiaA boy vanishes from a small Indiana town in November 1983, and a girl with a shaved head and a number instead of a name escapes from the government lab nearby. From that premise t…
587. Why a small family firm can own the company behind James BondIn corporate family trees, the parent need not be the giant. DanJaq, a closely held family company, controls Eon Productions, the much larger business that runs the James Bond fil…
588. Taco Bell began with a hot dog seller studying the queue across the streetIn 1948 Glen Bell ran a hot dog stand in San Bernardino, California, and kept noticing the long line outside the Mitla Cafe opposite, famous for crunchy hard-shell tacos. He tried…
589. Secretariat went to the owner who lost a coin tossIn the autumn of 1969, two horse owners met in a New York office to flip a coin, and each secretly hoped to lose. The winner would get one foal; the loser, two, including one not …
590. Selena learned Spanish phonetically to sing Tejano music, then became its queenThe Queen of Tejano Music grew up speaking English and wanted to record English songs. Her father insisted she sing in the Spanish-language style of her heritage, so she learned t…
591. Siemens started with a telegraph that pointed at letters instead of using MorseIn 1847 Werner von Siemens and Johann Georg Halske opened a Berlin workshop around a telegraph whose needle spelled out letters. Within twenty years their firm had strung a line 1…
592. Skype was sold three times for billions before Microsoft switched it offSkype got its name because a domain was taken. Its founders wanted Skyper, from sky and peer-to-peer, but the web addresses were gone, so they dropped the last letter. Over the ne…
593. How a Coca-Cola spinoff became the Hollywood studio owned by SonyOne of Hollywood's Big Five studios began life as a leftover from a soft-drink company. Coca-Cola bundled Columbia Pictures with TriStar in 1987, then within two years sold its st…
594. Spike Lee's first feature cost 175,000 dollars and took two weeks to shootSpike Lee made his first feature in two weeks on 175,000 dollars, writing, directing, producing, editing and acting in it himself. She's Gotta Have It went on to earn over 7 milli…
595. The S&P 500 grew out of a railroad guide from 1860America's best-known share index traces back to Henry Varnum Poor's 1860 handbook on railroads and canals. Today its 500 firms account for roughly 83 per cent of the value of all …
596. One anonymous 4chan post about a moving statue spawned 10,400 fictional monstersIn June 2007 someone posted a mock classified report to 4chan's paranormal board about a concrete statue that moves only when nobody is looking. Readers copied the format, and the…
597. Rivian beat Ford, GM and Tesla to sell the first electric pickupRivian began in 2009 as Mainstream Motors, planning a hybrid sports car that was shelved. Twelve years later it put the world's first fully electric pickup truck in consumers' han…
598. Rob Riggle spent 23 years as a Marine officer while building a comedy careerMost comedians do not hold the rank of lieutenant colonel. Rob Riggle joined the Marines in 1990 planning to fly, left flight school to chase laughs, and then kept serving in the …
599. Ronaldinho is the only player to win every major football trophy there isWorld Cup, Copa América, Confederations Cup, Champions League, Copa Libertadores and the Ballon d'Or: no other footballer has collected all six. Ronaldinho, nicknamed the Wizard, …
600. The defence giant behind radar missiles also gave kitchens the microwave ovenRaytheon began in 1922 making a tube that let radios run from the mains instead of costly batteries. During the Second World War it built most of the Allies' radar magnetrons, and…

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