Some things are just destined to fail, you know what I mean?
It could be products or movies or albums, pretty much anything.
And a lot of things don’t really surprise anyone when they go down the toilet.
Take a look at things that AskReddit users said shocked NO ONE when they failed.
1. A big one.
“Google+ will go down in history as one of the worst, most pointless decisions any tech giant has ever made.
Up there with Microsoft and RIM dismissing the iPhone as a toy when it came out.”
2. Not gonna happen.
“Zune.
I loved mine, but there was no way it was going to become the iPod k**ler it was trying to be.”
3. Well, duh.
“The War On Drugs.
Spoiler alert: drugs won.”
4. I remember!
“The Segway.
It was supposed to revolutionize the way we travel, according to its investors.”
5. Oops.
“Zillow’s attempt to become a Real Estate Brokerage.
Each transaction is unique and wasn’t going to be an algorithm based business. The CEO did a great takeover of the travel industry which lends itself to an algorithm. Real Estate is much more complicated.
Their app is a fun way for the public to enjoy exploring Real Estate and has many uses. However, investing in real estate as well as buying and selling real estate takes a human to evaluate the needs of each transaction. It’s early, still on my first cup, but you get the idea.”
6. Got dissed.
“When Xbox One got absolutely embarrassed by the public for attempting to make games tie to your console and require an internet connection.
They claimed this was what people wanted, when very clearly that was not the case. The PS4s diss ads were so good.”
7. Never heard of this one.
“The Ouya.
An android box with a cheap controller retailing for $99. It had no business getting what little big publisher support it got, and it was no surprise whatsoever to me that it failed as quickly as it did.
The storefront had sh**ty curation and the ability for anyone to publish meant it got flooded with stupid c**p I didn’t want to bother wading through extremely quick. I’m pretty sure the only reason it was successful at all was because it was a cheap, easy to use emulator before Raspberry Pi took off.”
8. Coffee Down Under.
“Starbucks in Australia.
A country with a VERY strong cafe and coffee culture, created by European migrants (Italian especially) who found a gap in the market. A country that makes baristas so good they’re in demand globally. A country where coffee drinkers have a relationship with their local cafes and care about the types and source of beans…
…and they thought American syrup sugar s**t would work. Starbucks’ failure in Australia is used as an example in finance classes of how to not read the room and fail.”
9. Weird.
“That CBS show “Kid Nation” TV show where they tried to make a bunch of kids from ages 8 – 15 run an abandoned western town where they had to cook their own food and submit to actual child labor.”
10. Ride the wave.
“Anyone here remember Google Wave?
It was Google’s attempt at an IM service (or social networking or whatever they were trying) that failed this for one reason: it showed the other person what you were typing when you were typing it. I know that sounds like a small thing but it turned me and a lot of others off.
How many times have you had an IM conversation where you started typing something then thought “nah, that’ll come out wrong” and deleted it? Now imagine the other person seeing it.”
11. Long gone.
“Blockbuster Video after Netflix happened.
Funny thing is around the early to mid 2000s Blockbuster had a chance to buy Netflix and they passed on it.
Whoops.”
12. Didn’t work.
“Target Canada.
This will be a business case study for centuries. It was the Titanic of new ventures: pretty much everything that could go wrong did, much of it out of misplaced hubris.
I remember reading an interview with the head of Target Canada in Report on Business magazine, published by our national newspaper of record, the Globe and Mail. He was enthusing about how Canadian stores were going to get brand new shelving. As someone who had been in grocery nearly twenty years at that point, I knew instantly the company was doomed.
Shoppers don’t care about shelving, they care about what’s on the shelves. And there wasn’t much. One of the biggest reasons is that rather than go with an established inventory control system such as SAP, Target decided to import its own. Except…they forgot to metricate it, leading to shelf capacities being dramatically wrong for every SKU.
It all just compounded from there. To save money, Target outsourced warehouse to store delivery. In practice that meant trucks arriving with skids of missing product and more skids of broken product and no ownership of the issues.
Rather than recruit people with big box experience, they relied heavily on MBAs, meaning management was even further out of touch with the events on the ground than they could have been. It was just a horror show all around, and a mercy when it finally d**d.”
Incidentally, Krispy Kreme made many of the same mistakes. You can’t just barge into Canada thinking it’s just like the United States. The retail (and foodservice) cultures are very, very different.
Now we want to hear from you.
What do you think surprised no one when it failed?
Tell us what you think in the comments!
