Several years ago, Masaru Ibula, the chairman of Sony, was at a company planing meeting. Suddenly he had a brilliant idea.he stopped the meeting and asked everyone present what would happen if Sony removed the recording function and speaker and sold headphone with a tape player instead. Almost everyone thought he was crazy.still, Ibuka kept thinking about his idea and worked at refining it. The result,of course, turned out to be the wildly successful Sony Walkman