--- title: "Products That Failed: 9 Real Examples and What They Have in Common" description: Google Glass. New Coke. Quibi. Nine products that failed — and the launch gap pattern they all share. What product and GTM teams can learn from each one. image: https://www.launchible.app/hubfs/9%20Launch%20Lessons.png --- [Skip to content](https://www.launchible.app/blog/products-that-failed#main-content) ![GTM Operating System | Launchible](https://www.launchible.app/hs-fs/hubfs/Launchible%20Logo%202%20with%20Wordmark%20320px.png?width=320&height=114&name=Launchible%20Logo%202%20with%20Wordmark%20320px.png) - [Home](https://www.launchible.app/) - [Blog](https://www.launchible.app/blog) - [About](https://www.launchible.app/about) - [FAQ](https://www.launchible.app/faq) - [Login](https://my.launchible.app) Open main navigation Close main navigation - [Home](https://www.launchible.app/) - [Blog](https://www.launchible.app/blog) - [About](https://www.launchible.app/about) - [FAQ](https://www.launchible.app/faq) - [Login](https://my.launchible.app) [All posts](https://www.launchible.app/blog/all) October 4, 2026 # Products That Failed: 9 Real Examples and What They Have in Common By  Dave Daniels  ·  5 minute read You shipped it. The team celebrated. And then — nothing. No spike in signups. No flood of activations. Just the quiet, sinking realization that the thing you built and the thing the market wanted to pay for weren't the same thing. You start questioning everything. Was it the branding? The price? The name? Do people even want this? Most product failure post-mortems blame the wrong things. They blame the market. The timing. The competition. The product itself. But look closely at the most famous product failures in business history — different industries, different decades, different budgets — and a different story shows up. Almost none of them failed because the product was bad. They failed because the team treated shipping as the finish line. ## **What Products That Failed Actually Have in Common** The products on this list weren't rushed. Most of them had real engineering talent, real funding, and real ambition behind them. What they had in common wasn't a bad idea. It was a missing owner for the space between the launch event and the revenue that was supposed to follow it. Shipping ends the build. Launching starts the revenue. Every team below treated those as the same event — and every one of them found out, the hard way, that they aren't. > *The products shipped. The revenue plans didn't.* ## **9 Products That Failed — And What the Pattern Reveals** Here are nine of the most documented product failures in business history, and what actually happened in the gap between the announcement and the outcome. ### **Google Glass (2013)** What happened: Google shipped an ambitious wearable computer to a small cohort of "Explorers" for $1,500, generating enormous press coverage and almost no path to a mainstream commercial product. Within two years, the consumer version was discontinued. The diagnosis: The product shipped to enthusiasts. Nobody owned the harder question — how does this generate recurring commercial value for a real buyer segment, not just headlines for a demo. ### **Amazon Fire Phone (2014)** What happened: Amazon poured years of engineering into a smartphone with novel 3D display technology and dynamic perspective features. It launched at $199 on contract, sales collapsed almost immediately, and Amazon took a $170 million write-down within months. The diagnosis: Massive engineering investment, minimal go-to-market work. The launch event was treated as if the announcement itself would generate revenue. ### **Microsoft Zune (2006)** What happened: Microsoft launched a competent, well-engineered MP3 player into a market where the iPod already owned nearly 70% share and an entire accessory ecosystem. Zune never captured more than a low single-digit share of the market before Microsoft discontinued the line. The diagnosis: A good product launched into a locked ecosystem with no real plan for how it would earn switching revenue. They shipped a product, not a revenue motion. ### **Segway (2001)** What happened: Segway arrived with extraordinary pre-launch hype — inventor Dean Kamen reportedly told investors it would be bigger than the internet. The company projected selling 10,000 units a week by the end of its first year. Actual sales over its first several years landed in the low tens of thousands total. The diagnosis: The gap between that claim and a repeatable revenue model was never closed. The product worked. The commercial plan behind it never existed at the scale the hype implied. ### **Quibi (2020)** What happened: Quibi raised $1.75 billion to build short-form premium video for mobile. It launched to roughly 1.7 million downloads in its first week — then usage cratered. The company shut down within seven months of launch. The diagnosis: Crickets, at a historic budget. The product shipped, fully built and fully funded. The revenue model — the reason someone would keep paying after the free trial — never did. ### **Juicero (2016)** What happened: Juicero raised over $120 million to build a Wi-Fi-connected juicing machine that pressed proprietary produce packs. Shortly after launch, Bloomberg demonstrated that the packs could be squeezed by hand, producing nearly identical juice without the $400 machine. The diagnosis: The value proposition between shipping and revenue was never stress-tested against the most obvious question a buyer would ask: what am I actually paying for here? ### **New Coke (1985)** What happened: Coca-Cola spent years and extensive taste-testing developing a reformulated Coke, launched it to replace the original recipe, and faced a consumer backlash so severe the company reversed course within 79 days. The diagnosis: Coca-Cola tested the product. They never tested the revenue consequence of retiring the brand equity that was already doing the commercial work for them. ### **Vine (2013–2017)** What happened: Twitter's six-second video app grew to over 200 million active users and produced genuine cultural stars — and never built a monetization model. Twitter shut it down in 2017. The diagnosis: Vine had the users. It had no revenue model. The gap between "product ships and grows" and "product generates revenue" was never owned by anyone. ### **Meta Workplace (2016–2025)** What happened: Meta launched Workplace, an enterprise version of Facebook for internal company communication, in 2016. After years of competing against Slack and Microsoft Teams without meaningfully closing the gap, Meta announced Workplace's shutdown, with the product winding down in 2025. The diagnosis: Meta shipped a genuinely capable enterprise product into a market already served by entrenched, well-funded incumbents — without a differentiated answer to why an enterprise buyer should switch. Product-market fit for a feature is not the same as a revenue motion against competitors that already own the budget line. ## **The Pattern Nobody Talks About** Different industries. Different decades. Different budgets — from Juicero's $120 million to Quibi's $1.75 billion. And the same root cause every time. The teams behind these products confused shipping with launching. They treated the announcement, the demo, the press cycle, as the finish line. No one owned the space between the product going live and the revenue actually starting to flow. There's a name for what happens in that space. Practitioners call it the Launch Gap — the distance between the moment a product ships and the moment it generates the revenue it was built to produce. Most teams have no plan for it. Most launches fall into it, and most post-mortems never find it, because the conventional diagnosis — bad timing, tough competition, a product that wasn't quite right — is almost never the real cause. The real cause is structural. The team that built the product and the team responsible for the commercial outcome were playing two different games with two different definitions of done. Engineering's done meant the product worked. Revenue's done meant customers were paying, repeatedly, at a number that justified what it cost to build and launch. Those two definitions of done can both be true on launch day and diverge completely within a quarter — and when they do, nobody in the room was actually accountable for closing the distance between them. ## **What Closing the Gap Actually Looks Like** The launches that didn't end up on a list like this one didn't just ship well. They engineered the transition from shipping to revenue as a deliberate, owned, measured process — not something that was assumed to happen automatically once the product was live. Someone specific was accountable for the outcome, not just the deliverables. The revenue target existed before the launch date did, not as a hopeful projection backfilled after the fact. And the organization had an honest, continuously updated picture of whether it was actually capable of producing that outcome — not a go/no-go meeting where everyone nodded because the calendar said it was time. That's the difference between a launch and a product going live. A product going live is an engineering event. A launch, done right, is a commercial one — with an owner, a number, and a plan for the exact space where every product on this list quietly disappeared. ## **The Takeaway for Product and Marketing Teams** The question to ask before your next launch isn't "are we ready to ship?" It's "do we have a plan for what happens after we ship?" Those are different questions, and teams that confuse them produce the case studies above — regardless of budget, regardless of talent, regardless of how good the underlying product actually was. If your last launch shipped on time and still missed its revenue targets, you've already lived this pattern. Launchible was built to close the Launch Gap. [Join the public beta →](https://www.launchible.app/beta) --- Dave Daniels is the founder of Launchible and the author of the BrainKraft Product Launch Framework. He has spent 20+ years helping product and GTM teams close the gap between shipping and revenue. 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All right reserved.  The Launch Gap ### Get the thinking behind the platform. 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