List of product failures

Commercial flops

Commercial failures in aviation

These are aircraft which were technically sound, but failed in the marketplace. For aircraft which failed to work at all see '#Flops in science and engineering'.

• The Bristol Brabazon - this giant airliner was simply too expensive, too large for the time, and carried too few passengers in great luxury rather than many passengers in less space.
• The Convair CV-880 and CV-990 - these aircraft were commercial disasters as they only offered five-abreast seating, and were easily out-competed on price by the Boeing 720 which was based on an existing aircraft type.
• Supersonic transports: Boeing 2707, Tupolev Tu-144, arguably Concorde
• The Dassault Aviation Mercure - this aircraft had extremely limited range and as a result only ten were put in service, by the French domestic airline Air Inter
• The Northrop F-20 Tigershark - this fighter aircraft was designed as a private venture for export, but failed utterly as foreign air forces wanted the more prestigious F-16 Fighting Falcon used by the USAF, despite the F-20 having superior performance and lower cost.
• The Boeing 737-600 and 757-300 failed to receive the orders that Boeing originally expected. The 737-600 is still for sale, however, and as the development cost was shared with other 737 models, it might not be considered a flop in the traditional sense. The Boeing 767-400ER, while receiving only a few orders, wasn't a flop because it was intended to be a niche aircraft for Delta Air Lines and Continental Airlines to replace their L-1011 and DC-10 fleets.
• The McDonnell Douglas (now part of Boeing) MD-87 and MD-90 failed to receive orders as compared with the Boeing 737 family and Airbus A320 family.
• Sales of the Airbus A318 and A340-200 are less than what Airbus expected.

Automotive flops

• Ford Motor Company's Edsel
• De Lorean automobile
• Electric cars - Ford Motor Company and General Motors, who only had lukewarm interest in the technology, have dropped production of their electric car models.
• Sinclair C5 - a battery powered car designed by Sir Clive Sinclair
• The Bricklin SV-1
• The General Motors V-8-6-4 variable cylinder engine.
• The Lincoln Blackwood luxury pickup truck

Computing flops

• The IBM 7030, also known as Stretch, was IBM's first attempt at building a supercomputer. Its actual performance was less than one third of its original specification. This resulted in IBM drastically dropping the price and losing money on every machine sold.
• The ILLIAC IV array processor supercomputer.
• Microsoft Windows 1.0 and Microsoft Windows 2.0 were huge flops because their sales were low, they were very slow, needed a lot of memory for the time, and practically no software were ever written for them.
• Microsoft Bob.
• Apple has had flops, notably the Apple III, Apple Lisa, and arguably the Apple Newton.
• IBM had the IBM PS/2 and the IBM PCjr.
• IBM's 4" diameter floppy disk drive, introduced at about the same time as Seagate's 3" floppy, Hitachi's 3.25" floppy, and Sony's 3.5" floppy. (All but Sony's flopped).
• The Commodore Amiga was a flop in the United States (but was successful in Europe).
• Amiga CDTV - This early multimedia computer was overpriced and suffered from using the obsolete AmigaOS 1.3, when version 2.0 was already available.
• Go (pen computing corporation), cited by Jim Louderback as one of the "eight biggest tech flops ever".
• Intel expected the Itanium processor (referred to by detractors as "the Itanic") to revolutionize the microprocessor industry, but after 7 years of development and billions of dollars spent the first Itanium chip proved an utter technical and commercial failure. However the project still goes on, and Itanium 2 is an improvement. (Furthermore, the Itanium had the valuable side effect of killing competition; its development caused several competing chips, such as the Alpha and advanced version of the Sparc, to be abandoned by timid management).
• Iomega Clik! drive. Cited by Jim Louderback as one of the "eight biggest tech flops ever".
• Magic Cap, an early PDA OS which failed to take off, and was eventually made irrelevant by the success of the Palm Pilot. Cited by Jim Louderback as one of the "eight biggest tech flops ever".
• In the 1980s, Commodore International became the first company to sell a million home computers. Hoping to repeat the success of its multi-million-selling VIC-20 and C-64 computers, it released the Commodore Plus/4 in 1984. It flopped. Commodore tried--and mostly failed--for 10 years to duplicate the C-64's success and went bankrupt in 1994.
• The INMOS Transputer, a brave attempt at a different way of computing - but now largely forgotten.
• WebTV (now MSN TV). Internet delivery via television set and set-top box. Cited by Jim Louderback as one of the "eight biggest tech flops ever".
• The Sinclair QL an unsuccessful attempt by Sinclair Research to make a 16 bit computer in the mid 1980s
• In 1982, Intel introduced the iAPX 432 microprocessor as the next great computer architecture after their x86 line. Considered one of the most complicated microprocessors ever built, it delivered low performance and went nowhere in the market.
• Next Computer, was Steve Jobs' attempt at revenge against the management of Apple Computer. The product and company were media darlings, but sold in small numbers.
• Taligent - IBM and Apple Computer collaboration in the 1990's to build a next generation object-oriented operating system.
• Coleco Adam - A home computer created by toy company Coleco that nearly bankrupted the company.
• Adobe LiveMotion - Adobe's failed animated vector graphics program to compete with Macromedia's Flash

Video game system flops

• The Atari 2600 E.T. game, which was so over-produced and undersold excess cartridges had to be buried in the desert.
• Sega has had numerous flops in North America, for example the Saturn, the Nomad, the Master System II and III, and the 32X (the Master System was successful in Europe and Brazil, and the Saturn was successful in Japan). The Megadrive was not well received in Japan. After Sega's last console the Dreamcast was discontinued, Sega abandoned hardware production altogether.
• NEC's Turbo series of consoles led them to pull out of the North American market by 1994. Like Sega, they released numerous peripherals, which did even worse than their Sega counterparts. Furthermore, critically acclaimed Japanese games were not released in America, in favor of licenses like Darkwing Duck. The Japanese version of the console, the PC Engine, was relatively successful.
• Nintendo's most notable flop is the much-maligned Nintendo Virtual Boy, which caused effects similar to drunkenness. It also has a history of introducing novel controllers that are utilized by only a handful of games, such as the Power Glove, Power Pad, SNES mouse, and the SNES Super Scope light gun.
• Nintendo also released a 'peripheral' in 1987 called R.O.B., which could do several tasks and play 2 games. It was largely created to be a marketing gimmick to convince investors that the NES was different than Atari's consoles of the past.
• The Game.com handheld
• The Atari Jaguar console and the Atari Lynx handheld.
• Daikatana, the hyped and massively delayed video game from John Romero.
• The Atari 2600 version of Pac-Man
• The Amiga CD-32
• The Compact Disc-Interactive (CD-I) player, a "multimedia machine" jointly developed by Philips and Sony. It was considered overpriced and underpowered.
• The 3DO Multiplayer, a "multimedia machine" (it was marketed as a family entertainment device and not just a video game console) designed by R.J. Mical and the team behind the Amiga and marketed by Trip Hawkins, founder of Electronic Arts. It was introduced at $699, twice the price of most game consoles.
• The Apple Pippin, a games console based on MacOS and the PowerPC - was abandoned before production, clearly was unlikely to have succeeded.
• The Nokia N-Gage - many video gamers simply mocked the system because of its clumsy design and this led to poor sales.

Internet Dot-Com flops

There are thousands of failed companies from the Dot-com Tech bubble of 2000. Here are a few of the largest and most famous.

• Webvan - grocery delivery service
• Kozmo.com - bike messenger delivery service for individuals
• Pets.com - online pet food store
• CMGI - internet incubator company
• Internet Capital Group - internet incubator company
• Exodus Communications - off-site compute server hosting
• Boo.com - clothing and accessories

Other commercial flops

• The 1976 Summer Olympics, which left the host city of Montreal in debts that it spent years paying off
• The Betamax VCR system - after some initial success it was soundly beaten in the marketplace by VHS. Betamax failed in part because it was not an open standard.
• The Digital Compact Cassette - a format introduced by Philips, which lost out to Minidisc and CD-R
• DIVX (not DivX, the video codec), a take-off on DVD that required users to pay per viewing. Retail electronics giant and DIVX backer Circuit City lost about $200m over the fiasco.
• eBook devices. Between 1999 and 2002, a number of companies, notably Gemstar, jockeyed for control of this supposedly vast, lucrative market, believing that consumers would pay hardcover prices for a severely limited number of book titles in DRM-encrypted formats that tied each electronic copy to a unique serialized hardware device. In 2002 the "eBooks are dead" meme became widespread. In 2003, Gemstar pulled the plug on its servers and Barnes and Noble ceased offering eBook content of any kind.
• The Elcaset audio format - an attempt at a higher-quality replacement for the compact cassette by Sony.
• Lymeswold cheese (UK)
• The Millennium Dome - a commercial and public relations disaster, it now lies empty in Greenwich, England.
• New Coke, introduced April 23rd 1985. The Coca-Cola company changed the formula and taste of its flagship product, a universally successful drink whose name was almost synonymous with soft drinks. It was a marketing and public relations debacle, and the company had to backtrack and return to the older formula. However, when they went back to the original formula, demand for the classic taste grew to a greater extent than before New Coke, propelling Coca-Cola to a market lead over rival Pepsi - making the situation an unintentional success for Coca-Cola.
• OK Soda, another soft drink manufactured and marketed by The Coca-Cola Company. Specifically targetted at Generation X, they attempted to use subtle and ironic advertising messages. The product was only released in select test markets, where it did not do well.
• The Arch Deluxe was McDonalds' attempt to market burgers to the adult fast-food consumer. Consumers were turned off by the unconventional ads and the high price; consumer groups were put off by the higher caloric content of the new burger.
• McDonalds' 1989 and 1994 attempts to serve pizza
• The Tanganyika groundnut scheme, a plan by Clement Attlee's British government, financed by British tax-payers, to cultivate tracts of what is now Tanzania with peanuts.
• Crystal Pepsi was Pepsi's answer to New Coke
• Dasani, Coca-Cola's brand of bottled water, was a flop in the UK after it emerged. It was essentially just Sidcup tap water, treated to make it more pure but in fact containing high levels of bromate.
• Pepsi Blue, low sales in spite of heavy advertising
• Iridium was a system of 66 satellites set up for global mobile phones. The service proved to be too expensive for wide use.
• Teledesic was a proposed system of hundreds of satellites to provide internet access. Bill Gates was a major investor.

Flops in science and engineering

A scientific flop may be something that took years of man-hours and a lot of money to complete (or perhaps never completed) and ended in failure.

Technical failures in aerospace

• The Brewster F2A Buffalo - this World War II fighter aircraft was outclassed by most Axis fighters early in the war but held its own on some occasions
• The Europa rocket failed five times, without a single successful launch
• The Messerschmitt Me 163 was so dangerous that it killed more Luftwaffe pilots than Allied airmen.
• Most reusable space vehicles: Shuttle Buran, HOTOL, various NASA space planes, arguably the Space Shuttle.
• The Spruce Goose flying boat, Howard Hughes' white elephant.
• Project Vanguard (1958), the first attempt by the United States to put a satellite into orbit. The project managers insisted on using a new, civilian-designed, purpose-built rocket. There were repeated embarrassing crashes. After Sputnik, it was quickly decided to use proven military missile designs as the base for future space attempts.

Weapons

• The Chauchat light machine gun - the French weapon of WWI was notorious for its unreliability, prone to jamming and lack of precision manufacturing.
• The German Maus tank was so heavy (188 tons) that it was unusable
• The British SA80 rifle was notoriously unreliable.

Scientific projects

• Cold fusion - after much hype, claims of success proved false. (Research into cold fusion continues.)
• Project Mohole was a 1950s proposal to drill through Earth's crust and sample the material below, but it was never implemented because in the mid-1960s the planners realized it was impossible.
• MIT Media Lab founded in the 1980s to address issues of media convergence. Failed to produce more than a handful of commercially viable ideas. Media convergence occurred without the lab's help. In the early 2000s major financial mismanagement and extravagant spending by faculty forced the lab to cancel a proposed expansion. Lab continues to fight for relevance despite having no clear mission.

Civil engineering projects

• The Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapsed due to resonance in a gale force wind.
• The John Hancock Tower in Boston is, as the article notes, "known more for its early engineering flaws than for its architectural achievement." Wind-induced torsional and lateral oscillation was so large as to induce motion sickness in upper-floor residents. Ten thousand of the floor-to-ceiling plate-glass windowpanes fell out of the building to the ground (with, amazingly, no injuries to passersby or building residents). During engineering analysis of these problems, it was discovered that under certain wind conditions the building could actually have undergone a Tacoma-Narrows-like collapse. The entire 58th floor is now devoted to a damping system containing two 300-ton weights.
• The Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis, Missouri, designed by Minoru Yamasaki. This was a major urban renewal project completed in 1956 which almost immediately fell in to disrepair, disuse and vandalism. It was entirely demolished on March 16, 1972 and this event is seen as a major milestone in postmodernism.

Mechanical engineering projects

• Isambard Kingdom Brunel's Atmospheric railway in South Devon, England in the 1840's failed because of problems in maintaining a vacuum seal.

Political flops

Canadian elections

• Newly-appointed Prime Minister Kim Campbell, who was initally praised for being a fresh face with uniquely feminine sensibilities, led the ruling Conservatives to a massive defeat in the 1993 election campaign losing 152 of their incumbent seats in the House of Commons and winning only two seats. Campbell lost her own, and had to resign after serving as PM for only seven months. She quickly faded into obscurity.
• Stockwell Day became leader of the Canadian Alliance in the 2000 election campaign -- despite predictions that his charismatic presence could lead the party to an electoral breakthrough, the party gained just six additional seats in that year's election, and Day proved so spectacularly ineffective as leader that thirteen caucus members quit the party a year later. Day himself was turfed by the party after serving less than a year.

French elections

• The unnecessary dissolution of a favourable parliament (Assemblée nationale) in 1997 by President Jacques Chirac should have presaged an easy win for his partisans. They lost, yielding power to the opposition.
• In the 2002 presidential campaign, extreme right Jean-Marie Le Pen went in second position, just before Lionel Jospin, who said immediately he retired from politics.

Indian elections

• Bharatiya Janata Party peformed unexpectedly well in the Assembly Elections in four states and wanted to exploit this success for the Indian general elections, 2004. Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee wasn't too keen to have early elections, but he succumbed to party pressure and prematurely dissolved the 13th Lok Sabha. BJP planned a huge election campaign called India Shining with help of professional ad agencies. Indian National Congress headed by Sonia Gandhi replied with the Aam Aadmi (Common man) campaign. BJP mocked Sonia's leadership capabilities and questioned her foreign origins. The media was certain that BJP would come back to power. But to everybody's shock, BJP suffered a defeat and the Congress, with its allies, formed the Government.

UK elections

• Sir James Goldsmith's anti-EU Referendum Party failed to win a single seat in the 1997 general election, despite heavy publicity and a significant number of votes.
• The Labour Party's performance at the 1983 general election, led by Michael Foot. The manifesto was described as 'the longest suicide note in political history'.
• The Conservative Party's performance at the 1997 general election, and also at 2001 general election. In both General Elections the Conservatives were routed disastrously. Their showing was both times far worse than that of Michael Foot.

USA Presidential campaigns

• In the 1912 Election, Republican incumbent William H. Taft received only 8 electoral votes to 88 for Bull Moose Party candidate Theodore Roosevelt and 435 for Woodrow Wilson, the Democratic nominee, the worst ever showing for an incumbent president. Splitting the Republican base with Roosevelt, he garnered only 23% of the popular vote, the least support ever for a major party candidate. He was also the only major party candidate in American history to lose either the electoral or popular vote to a third party candidate.
• In the 1932 Election, Republican incumbent Herbert Hoover earned 59 electoral votes and 40% of the popular vote to Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt's 472 and 58%, respectively. Having earned 444 electoral votes and 58% of the popular vote in 1928, Hoover's fall was the worst repudiation of a president in modern American history.
• In the 1964 Election, Republican Barry Goldwater got 52 electoral votes to 486 for incumbent Lyndon Johnson and lost by 22 points in the popular vote, the worst popular defeat ever for a Republican presidential nominee in the 20th Century.
• In the 1972 Election, Democrat George McGovern received only 17 electoral votes to 520 for incumbent Richard Nixon and lost by 23 points in the popular vote, the worst popular defeat for a Democratic presidential nominee in the 20th Century.
• In the 1980 Republican Primaries, John Connally spent millions of dollars hoping to win the nomination and instead ended up with only a single delegate to the convention.
• In the 1984 Election, Democrat Walter Mondale got 13 electoral votes and one state to 525 and 49 states for incumbent Ronald Reagan, the worst ever electoral defeat for a Democratic presidential nominee in the 20th Century.
• In 2004, Howard Dean ran for the Democratic nomination in 2004 and gaining lots of support and front-page articles in major news magazines prior to the primary elections, but ended up third in the 2004 Iowa Democratic caucuses. After suffering a string of unbroken defeats, Dean won only the non-binding District of Columbia primary and his home state of Vermont after he had dropped out of the race.

See also

• product management
• management
• new product development
• product