New York Times: Solving a Riddle Wrapped in a Mystery Inside a Cookie. Fortune cookies, Yasuko Nakamachi says, are almost certainly originally from Japan. Her prime pieces of evidence are the generations-old small family bakeries making obscure fortune cookie-shaped crackers by hand near a temple outside Kyoto.

I heard the hidden messages in moon cakes explanation while growing up. In the end, I see the fortune cookie lesson as a reflection of our business world. Some people/companies are inventors, and other people/companies are marketers. For some products, we deeply associate the invention with the inventors, and for other products we associate them with those people or companies that drove them into mainstream. You can sit around all day wondering why Japanese restaurants don’t serve fortune cookies or why most computers run Mac OS (yeah!) or Windows (boo!) instead of Xerox OS. Everything looks obvious in hindsight.