Business History

Decades ago, if you wanted to watch Columbo, you watched it when it aired. Then Sony invented the Betamax, a machine that let you record TV and watch it whenever you wanted. Sony’s chief called it “time shifting.” American TV studios called it theft.
Universal and Disney sued Sony, and the fight went all the way to the Supreme Court, with a surprise cameo from Mr. Rogers along the way. Today, we’re still arguing over who is responsible for what people do with a new technology.
Jacob and Robert tell the story of how the Sony Betamax beat Universal Studios, and then ultimately lost to a rival format – the VHS.
Research for this episode comes from:
Fast Forward: Hollywood, the Japanese, and the VCR Wars, by James Lardner
“The Story of Sony v. Universal Studios: Mary Poppins Meets the Boston Strangler,” by Jessica Litman
Made in Japan: Akio Morita and Sony, by Akio Morita, Edwin M. Reingold, and Mitsuko Shimomura
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Before there was Canada, there was the Hudson’s Bay Company.
HBC had its own laws and its own currency, and at one point controlled trade routes from the Arctic to Hawaii. It started cities like Winnipeg, Edmonton, and Victoria. It also fought an actual war with a rival business over pemmican, a traditional indigenous snack made of dried buffalo meat, fat and berries.
Business History’s resident Canadian Robert Smith tells Jacob Goldstein how two French traders built an empire out of beaver fur, and how the company they created later signed one of the biggest real estate deals in history.
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Before Reuters was a global news giant, it was a man and 45 homing pigeons. Julius Reuter saw that the telegraph would change how information moved, and he used that to his advantage. He didn’t have to get news out immediately — he just had to be first. Jacob Goldstein and Robert Smith follow Reuter from Germany to England, where he scoops The Times of London with news that Europe was headed to war.
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Jacob Goldstein and Robert Smith talk with Adrian Wooldridge, co-author of The Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea.
Companies are some of the most powerful institutions in the modern world – right up there with the nation-state. Where did the modern corporation come from? And what do AI and Chinese state-owned firms mean for the future of the company?
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In the late 1800s, a Russian immigrant named Samuel Zemurray spent nearly everything he had on a load of bananas, and turned it into a fortune. But Sam the Banana Man wasn’t just a business titan. He was a puppeteer on the geopolitical stage, bankrolling a revolution in Honduras and pushing the CIA to overthrow Guatemala’s democratically elected leader.
For decades, Zemurray battled the United Fruit Company, an institution with its tentacles in governments across the Americas — including the United States. In the end, he wound up running the company.
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