Behind the Curtain: 35 Startling Facts About Tech Companies

William Shockley, a co-inventor of the transistor, decided to cease silicon-based research. The remaining researchers disagreed with him and went on to form Intel, AMD, and National Semiconductor.

27. The reason all videos are subtitled on Netflix is that the National Association for the Deaf filed a class-action lawsuit against them in 2010.

28. In late 2004, Samsung had the opportunity to buy Android but passed on the investment because they did not see any potential. Google acquired it two weeks later.

29. HP founders, Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard, flipped a coin to decide whether their company would be named Hewlett-Packard (HP) or Packard-Hewlett (PH).

30. In 2012, before the introduction of Uber, a Toronto Taxi license was sold for $360,000. By 2018, they were rumored to be down to $65,000 and likely still dropping. The New York City taxi medallions topped out at $1.3 million in 2013, and now are as low as $160,000.

Mark Zuckerberg attempted to buy Snapchat for $3 billion in November of 2013 but was rejected. Almost 3 years later, Instagram cloned Snapchat’s main features and launched ‘Instagram Stories’.

32. Sony is primarily an insurance company in Japan and electronics are not their main source of income.

33. The original Xbox was originally pitched to Dell, Compaq, and Gateway to all manufacture the system while Microsoft would simply provide the operating system, just like they had done with Windows and the PC. Each company turned them down.

34. In March 2011, Korea’s anti-trust regulator went to a Samsung facility in Suwon to raid the building, looking for evidence of possible collusion between the company and wireless operators to fix the prices of mobile phones. Before investigators could get inside employees began eating documents.

35. Spotify pays artists between 150-200% more than regular US radio stations.