Lotus 1-2-3 - Failure Museum

Lotus 1-2-3

Lotus 1-2-3 was the state-of-the-art spreadsheet and the standard throughout the 1980s and into the early 1990s, part of an unofficial set of three stand-alone office automation products that included dBase and WordPerfect, to build a complete business platform.

During the early 1990s, Windows grew in popularity, and along with it, Excel, which gradually displaced Lotus from its leading position as Lotus had suffered technical setbacks in this period. A planned total revamp of 1-2-3 for Windows fell apart, and all that the company could manage was a Windows adaptation of their existing spreadsheet with no changes except using a graphical interface. Additionally, several versions of 1-2-3 had different features and slightly different interfaces.

Titanic - Failure Museum

Titanic

The Titanic was a British ocean liner that sank on April 15, 1912 as a result of striking an iceberg on her maiden voyage from Southhampton, England to New York City. 1496 of the 2224 passengers died making it the deadliest sinking of a single ship at the time. The Titanic received a series of warnings from other ships of drifting ice in the area, but the captain ignored them. It was generally believed that ice posed little danger to large vessels.  The Titanic only had enough lifeboats to carry about half of those on board, while the lifeboats were only filled up to an average of 60%. The “women and children first” protocol was generally followed when loading the lifeboats, and most of the male passengers and crew were left aboard. Women and children survived at rates of about 75% and 50%, while only 20% of men survived.

Beautycounter - Failure Museum

Beautycounter

Founded in 2013, Beautycounter, a leader in the clean beauty business, raised over $100M and was sold to a private equity firm for $1B in 2021. As the pandemic receded, consumer spending went down and sales slowed across the entire beauty sector. While Beautycounter’s focus on clean formulations was a selling point when it launched, it now faced legions of competitors leading to its demise in 2024.

ESPN Mobile Phone - Failure Museum

ESPN Mobile Phone

Launched and discontinued in 2006, ESPN burned through $150M (including $30M on a Super Bowl ad) for its mobile phone and only hit 6% of its sales target. ESPN built a wireless service and special phone so sports nuts could receive score updates, launch GameCast, and browse ESPN.com content. In addition to the $300 cost for the phone, customers had to spend between $65 and $225 per month for content.

Febreeze Scent Stories - Failure Museum

Febreze Scent Stories

Launched in 2004, Febreze Scent Stories was a clamshell device which added new scents every five minutes within a 30-minute disc. They proclaimed: “You can play scents… like you play music!” By making Shania Twain its spokesperson who helped with fragrance selection, consumers incorrectly assumed the device would also play her music.

Chevy Nova - Failure Museum

Chevy Nova

Launched in 1962, Chevrolet had problems selling the Chevy Nova automobile in Latin America since “no va” means “it doesn’t go” in Spanish.

Apple HyperCard - Failure Museum

Apple HyperCard

Launched in 1987, HyperCard was a tool for making tools – Mac users could use Hypercard to build their own mini-programs to balance their taxes, manage sports statistics, make music – all kinds of individualized software that would be useful (or fun) for individual users. These little programs were called stacks, and were built as a system of cards that could be hyperlinked together. 

Mac users have an innate sense of “Mac-like”; most Mac users can determine whether a particular software package is Mac-like within 60 seconds of launching it and poking around. And HyperCard stacks, never felt even close to Mac-like. It always felt like HyperCard was its own little GUI universe running within the Mac OS (even though we didn’t call it “Mac OS” back then). Stacks felt and looked consistent with other stacks, but never felt, looked, or acted like other Macintosh apps.

Not only did HyperCard stacks eschew the standard Mac OS GUI control widgets, but they even went so far as to hide the menu bar. Which is fine for games, but for just about anything else, it’s an outright insult to Mac UI sensibilities.

Coleco Adam - Failure Museum

Coleco Adam

Launched in 1983 and discontinued in 1985, the Coleco Adam computer was heavily criticized upon launch for numerous defects in early units. About 60 percent of Adam owners returned their units because of the defects leading to Coleco filing for bankruptcy.

Rabbit R1 - Failure Museum

Rabbit R1

Launched in 2024, the Rabbit R1 is supposed to be a “super-clever, ultra-helpful AI assistant” which was pre-ordered by over 100,000 people. However, the R1 is underwhelming, underpowered, and undercooked. It can’t do much of anything.

Life Savers Soda - Failure Museum

Life Savers Soda

Launched in 1981 and discontinued in 1982, Life Savers Soda actually fared well in taste tests. But it tanked once in stores. Explained one brand critic, quoted in the 2005 book Brand Failures: “The Life Savers name gave consumers the impression they would be drinking liquid candy.”