Lessons from The Biggest Flops of the Last Decade

It's 2020. it's a new decade. I think it's time we look back at the most iconic product failures of the last decade and learn from them. So many new companies, new products and new ideas that made us nothing but hopeful to the future. Yet, many of these products failed to deliver on their promise. I will be talking here about products that sounded like the biggest next thing, yet they completely (or almost completely) shut down, shelved, or died a sad death. Honestly, a lot more products come to mind than the those I'll be covering. However, those were very iconic failures due to the success factors they potentially held. Feel free to add more failures that I do not cover here. Let's go!

1. Google+. A giant like Google couldn't pull it off. It doesn't matter how much resources you have, what matters is the readiness to compete. Their "Circles" feature offered some illusion of privacy - at least to your different social circles. A lot of people signed up - to never visit it back again. I keep thinking whether it was a matter of user experience, privacy, marketing or launching issues. The most thing that comes to me seeing this back is that Google was not ready to compete in social media. Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc had a lot of years in experience there. Resources alone was not doing it for Google. And Google+ could not survive. Google eventually killed it in April 2019.

2. Windows phones. Windows phones came out early 2010s promising to change the way we use phones. They have pioneered and led the globe in Operation Systems (OS) - of computers! That is where they fell short. An operating system is NOT an operating system. The way we use computers is fundamentally different than the way we use phones. I think the previous point applies in not being ready in this field like Apple or Google, but also no innovation in it that drove changing a huge market to a new operating system. That is probably why Huawei is still trying to stay on Android. Facebook is reportedly working on their OS. I wonder how that'll go down. It's a duopoly at this point.

3. Google Glass. I've tried this personally. It was really promising. It raised many technical, and most importantly privacy-related, questions. There were no-using-Google-Glass-here signs in some places before it was even launched! Talk about PR! An amazing concept that would have led the future of wearable technologyAgain, yet went to ashes before our eyes. A giant focused on their resources and innovation, but failed to get ready with their business approach.

4. Vine. This is probably my favorite. Vine was extremely promising and took the world by storm. The idea of a 6-second video was so new. It opened up endless possibilities to upcoming comedians and was the birth place of some of today's most famous memes. Twitter bought early and had no idea to do with it. Later on, sadly, an amazing idea with big potential was shut down.

5. Tumblr. Another intesting take to social media. Yahoo took a swing to yet another bad decision. It apparently suffered from being able to get enough users to turn them into sweet dollars. All its features were shadowed by bigger platforms and its management suffered under Yahoo! The way they took it forward was so wrong, Yahoo sold it reportedly for less than $20m after buying it for $1.1 Billion!

6. Modular phones. It was an amazing idea backed and taken by giants. No need to buy a new phone every year or so, just change the different parts of your existing phones. Just like you can upgrade your software, you can upgrade your hardware. The biggest take on this was, again yes you guessed it, by Google - with their Project Ara. Unfortunately, they couldn't find a market fit even before the launch, and was eventually shelved by end of 2016.

So many amazing ideas that would have changed our lives today. Business agility was the factor that drove them to succeed or fail. Unfortunately, business giants still couldn't pull them off. We must learn from these mistakes and always remember that a small or big company taking a project can't assure anything of its future. It's all up to how to handle the project from the right angles and think of the little details. Hearing the market and reacting with it is a must. Forcing it to go into something it is not ready for will always backfire.

Have I missed other big iconic failures? Let me know.

Happy New Year and happy new decade ??