20 Biggest Business and Product Failures in Recent History

Dumb decisions, awful phones and stupid software — these are some of the worst business moves in modern history.

It Stinks! 20 Bank-Busting Business and Product Failures of the Past 20 Years

There have been some truly incredible leaps in technology and savvy business moves over the last 20 years. We went from dial-up to broadband and beyond. Smartphones replaced flip phones. Streaming services changed the game for television. Disney became our entertainment and media overlord.

Yet for every good idea that works, a dozen don’t. Failure is a rite of passage for every business. But some failures are so spectacularly terrible, they make history. Be it from mismanagement, awful implementation, misreading the market or just plain bad ideas, these 20 head-scratching business moves and product failures from 2000-2020 are the biggest disasters in recent memory.

Google+

Google+ was a spectacular failure. According to Mashable, the Google of 2010-2011 was “increasingly fearful of Facebook snatching away users, employees and advertisers,” and desperate to fix its problem. Development was intense and “absolute madness,” according to one former Google+ employee, and Google employed 1,000 people to work on its new massive social network. Yet when it debuted, it was basically just Facebook by Google and a barren one at that.

After years of additional work and virtually no user engagement, a data breach spurred the hasty shutdown of Google+ in 2019. NextWeb estimated that Google+ cost about $585 million just to create. Google was so desperate for user engagement they tried several ways to force users to use their new platform, the most egregious example being when Google required users to use their Google+ account to leave comments on YouTube in 2013.

On Jan. 7, 2020, Google agreed to pay $7.5 million in damages to users affected by the data breach. That amounts to $5 to $7 per affected user after lawyers take their $1.875 million cut.

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TwitterPeek

What if you had a mobile device, but all it could do was launch Twitter? That was the entire idea behind TwitterPeek, which looked like a calculator with a keyboard. It cost $99, and after six months of free SMS service, you would have to pay $7.95 a month for its data plan. Can you imagine paying $7.95 a month to watch people endlessly complain?

Even more bizarre: TwitterPeek launched in 2009, when the iPhone, Android devices, BlackBerry and even Windows Mobile were on the market.

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Google Glass

Google is still developing Google Glass — although now it’s geared toward business use —but when it debuted in 2014 to the general public, it was a disaster. For $1,500, Google Glass let you take pictures with a wink or record your surroundings like a cyborg. The latter is why early adopters were called “Gl***holes” by people wary of what Google Glass could or couldn’t do.

“If someone were sitting at a table with their smartphone constantly pointing in a certain direction and you didn’t know what they were doing with it, you’d feel pretty uncomfortable as well,” a New York restaurant owner told the New York Post.

Google Glass felt like an affront to our dwindling-away right to privacy. Backlash was swift. There were reports of Glass wearers being kicked out of bars, cafes and restaurants. At least one person was assaulted and robbed for wearing them.

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Verizon’s Go90

The Go90 was Verizon’s $1.2 billion attempt to pivot from crusty old phone provider to a totally hip and cool millennial-focused business. Verizon wanted Go90 to be a whole new video platform. It made a plethora of expensive deals to stream established shows, original content providers and live sports, and there were also some shoddy attempts to create a social network with “crews,” where you could share video clips with a group of friends. There were reports that content providers made out like bandits, although their videos received few views.

Go90 launched in 2015. Verizon shuttered the entire project July 31, 2018.

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Juicero

Juicero (pronounced joo-serr-O) raised $118.5 million in venture capital to fund an overpriced, $700 machine that literally just squeezed pre-packaged bags of sliced veggies and fruits (which cost $5-$7 and had a QR code requiring the user to scan them on the almighty Juicero before being used). It didn’t take long for reviewers to figure out those bags could simply be squeezed by hand for the same result, despite Juicero wielding four tons of fruit-crushing force.

Juicero released in March 2016 and was flattened by September 2017. Google was one of its main investors. CNET called Juicero “the greatest example of Silicon Valley stupidity.”

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Facebook Phone

In 2013, Facebook was having an incredible time, business-wise. Its IPO had a peak market capitalization of $104 billion; the social media giant was massively popular, and perhaps Mark Zuckerberg felt like he could do no wrong. So he made a new app called Facebook Home, which turned a compatible Android phone into one big Facebook platform.

Facebook Home came pre-installed the HTC First, which was dubbed the Facebook Phone. Within a month, AT&T dropped the price of the Facebook Phone from $99 to $0.99. Facebook Home itself was poorly designed and negatively reviewed on the Google Play Store where it was infrequently downloaded; it received its last update in December 2013 and has disappeared from the app market entirely.

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'John Carter'

John Carter wasn’t just a flop, it was the biggest bomb in movie history, losing Disney over $200 million. The Mouse House may have made some other stinkers (like “The Lone Ranger”), but “John Carter” is the company’s biggest flop.

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Fyre Festival

Billy McFarland leaves federal court after his arraignment in New York on Saturday, July 1, 2017.

Ja Rule’s 2017 Fyre Festival was a disaster so epic there are two documentaries about it. Most tickets went for $500, some paid $4,000, and the top-of-the-line package, which included lavish lodging, food and travel, went for $300,000 (although it didn’t seem to sell, unfortunately).

Ticket holders were told to upload money into a wristband for ease of use, and so they did. Guests — who were mainly Instagram influencers and wealthy young people — arrived by plane or boat to the Bahamian island of Great Exuma, expecting a highly Instagrammable, sybaritic weekend. Instead, they arrived to shoddy, half-broken tents and rain-soaked mattresses.

Fyre Festival company founder, Billy McFarland, pleaded guilty to two counts of wire fraud in 2018. He’s currently serving six years, while Ja Rule was cleared of wrongdoing from a $100 million class-action lawsuit levied against him.

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Fire Phone

“Can we build a better phone for Amazon Prime members? The answer is yes,” Jeff Bezos said on stage during a Seattle press conference in July 2014, triumphantly holding up a Fire Phone to a mildly cheering audience. He went on to display some brand new “meh” features, like “dynamic perspective” 3D graphics and a map that popped up Yelp reviews if you tilted the phone.

One month after shipping, Amazon sold an estimated 35,000 phones. One year later, Amazon lost $170 million on the devices and reported a $437 million net loss for its 2014 Q4. At the time, Amazon had $83 million worth of Fire Phones in unused stock, and presumably, they still do.

But there’s a silver lining for Amazon: the Fire Phone was partially responsible for the beginnings of voice recognition software, which would eventually become Alexa.

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The Coolest Cooler

Look, that on the beach. Is it a blender? A speaker? A cutting board? A cooler? Nay, my dear, it’s all that and more! The Coolest Cooler is the second most successful Kickstart campaign ever, raising over $13.28 million for a “portable party” that turned out to be a complete and total failure.

Twenty thousand original backers never received their cooler, with cooler creator Ryan Grepper citing 2019 tariffs as an “insurmountable challenge” to deliver a final product that was promised five years prior. A 2017 lawsuit and settlement with the Oregon Department of Justice found that the business had to pay back $20 (of the $200 original pledged) to backers who didn’t receive their cooler. But now that the company is out of cash, that’s unlikely to happen.

About 40,000 Coolest Coolers were shipped, and for a brief period, the Coolest Cooler could be purchased for $400.

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WeWork

WeWork, once a soaring co-working real estate company with a valuation of $47 billion (which was likely fudged by SoftBank, then its biggest investor and now its owner), plummeted to below $5 billion after its failed IPO. The company’s timeline and data sheets are full of bizarre events.

In one highly publicized incident, WeWork founder Adam Neumann, after changing WeWork’s name to the We Company, trademarked the “We” and licensed the name back to WeWork, still his own company, for $5.9 million before giving the cash back. The company laid off 2,400 companies in November 2019, while SoftBank gave Neumann a $1.7 billion golden parachute to exit the company.

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The Zune

The people who owned Microsoft’s Zune seemed to love it. But just not enough people bought one. Microsoft first released the Zune in November 2006 as a competitor to Apple’s iPod. The company lost $289 million that same quarter.

By 2009, independent reports revealed that the Zune had a market share of less than 2 percent. Microsoft released its final model, the Zune HD, in 2010. By 2012 the Zune was discontinued.

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Theranos

Charles Ponzi has a scheme named after him. Perhaps history will treat Elizabeth Holmes the same way.

Holmes created Theranos, a blood-testing company, as a 19-year-old Stanford dropout. Touting Theranos as a healthcare company that could successfully test blood using one one-thousandth of the blood needed for traditional blood tests. Using embellishments, exaggerations and lies, Holmes was heralded as the next Steve Jobs; she made the cover of magazines and was the subject of numerous high-profile features, including Time’s 2015 100 Most Influential People. Oops.

According to Vanity Fair, citing John Carreyrou’s “Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup,” Holmes outright fabricated false test results for Walgreens. When her CFO found out, she fired him. She told investors that Theranos would bring in $100 million in revenue; it was going to make $100,000. By 2014, Theranos had raised $700 million and was given a valuation of $9 billion.

In 2018, the SEC charged Holmes with “massive fraud,” ordered her to pay a $500,000 and barred her from serving as a director or officer of a public company for 10 years. She and former Theranos company president Sunny Balwani are awaiting a federal trial for conspiracy and fraud.

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HD DVD

From 2006 to 2007, Toshiba fought hard against Blu-rays (which had Sony’s support) with its HD DVDs. A number of factors swayed the market toward Blu-rays, including the mega-popular PlayStation 3, which became the cheapest Blu-ray player available for a time. The first nail-in-the-coffin came when Warner Bros. went exclusive with Blu-Ray, and many other companies, like Netflix and Walmart, followed suit. Toshiba lost $986 million during its high definition war.

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Magic Leap

Magic Leap is an augmented reality headset company, which has raised an astounding $2.6 billion since 2016. Despite this massive flow of cash, the company has only sold 6,000 Magic Leap One headsets (price: $2,295) six months after release. Dozens of people were laid off in late 2019, and two higher-level board members left the company in 2018. There’s lots of competition on the market and the horizon, too: Microsoft already has the HoloLens, while Facebook and Apple are researching their own AR glasses.

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3D Televisions

For a mercifully brief period, it seemed like every movie shown in theaters was filmed for 3D (we can blame “Avatar” for that). And while 3D might work fine in theaters for some movies, donning stupid glasses at home was something most people didn’t want to do.

3D TVs were available in 2010 from all major manufacturers, but lack of interest caused TV makers to gradually drop support. Vizio cut the 3D cord in 2013, while Samsung stopped making them in 2016. By 2017 there was virtually no support for 3D TVs left.

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Windows Phone

Microsoft’s Windows phone was a bold move that didn’t pay off. But it wasn’t just a lack of interest from buyers that killed Microsoft’s baby. The Windows Phone was routinely blocked by Google from using important apps, like YouTube. Furthermore, Internet Explorer and Hotmail were not exactly the browser or email of choice.

The first Windows Phone released in November 2010. By August 2015, Microsoft had cornered 2.5 percent of the market. It was dead by Oct. 2017, and by 2019, Microsoft said it would no longer support existing devices.

Microsoft lost a ton of cash on this experiment, which involved the acquisition of Nokia and its phone business for $7.2 billion. Microsoft lost $7.6 billion and cut 7,800 jobs.

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Samsung Galaxy Note 7

The Galaxy Note 7’s battery freakin’ exploded. It blew up on a plane, in someone’s hands and burned down a car. Samsung was slow on its recall notice, creating a PR disaster. It lost $4.6 billion in its Q3 of 2016 and slashed revenue expectations by $41.8 billion. Over the next year, it lost about $26 billion due to the explosive devices.

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Faraday Future

In 2014. Faraday Future was a majorly hyped company that was going to produce the ultimate electric vehicle. It was poising itself to be the next Tesla, or even better, the Tesla killer. It had dreams of building a $1 billion factory in Nevada, but those dreams were dashed. Its billionaire founder Jia Yueting, had fled China due to financial issues and a Chinese court froze $182 million of his assets. According to The Verge, “mounting debts, unpaid bills, supplier lawsuits and financial mismanagement” nearly destroyed the company (it blew through an $800 million investment in six months). The company put “dozens” of people on unpaid leave in 2019.

The company is still kicking, somehow. Yueting declared bankruptcy and stepped down from his CEO position, with Carsten Breitfeld — the man who helped create the BMW i8 supercar — taking his place. Since 2014, Faraday Future has spent around $2 billion and hasn’t produced anything beyond a prototype.

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AOL/Time Warner

Steve Case, co-founder and former chief executive officer and chairman of America Online (AOL) who was instrumental in AOL's merger with Time Warner.

It was, and still is, the largest merger in history. In 2000, AOL and Time Warner merged in a business deal valued at $165 billion — about $245 billion today. The deal itself took one year to be approved by regulatory entities and became the biggest disaster in business history. For starters, the two companies hated one another.

“I saw AOL in a much less favorable light [than Time Warner], much more opportunistic, made up of folks who were really trying to merely exploit the market they were in as opposed to developing something that was enduring, and I was very leery about this deal,” Timothy Boggs, then a Time Warner senior VP, told the New York Times.

The dot-com bubble began to burst in mid-2000, slowing financial forecasts for AOL. As the bubble burst in 2001, stockholders pulled out. Later, it would be discovered that AOL had been inflating its advertising revenue by over $1 billion, drawing the ire of the S.E.C. and Department of Justice, resulting in $510 million in fines. By 2009, AOL and Time Warner parted ways. May the 2020s bring us even more schadenfreude.