List of major flops

However, most of the items listed below are ones that had high expectations, large amounts of money or widespread publicity, but fell far short of success. Obviously, due to the subjective nature of "success" and "meeting expectations", there can be disagreement about what constitutes a "major flop".

Two examples: David McReynolds ran for President of the United States in 1980 and 2000 on the socialist ticket, but came nowhere near winning. However, he would never characterize his campaign as a flop because he ran for president in order to get his causes recognized, without any hope of being elected. But the creation of New Coke is generally regarded indisputably a "major flop".

Entertainment

Musical comebacks gone horribly awry

• MC Hammer's failed restyling as a gangsta rapper.
• New Kids on the Block didn't make the comeback cut as "NKOTB".
• Diana Ross had to cancel her "Diana Ross and the Supremes" tour for lack of interest, mainly because she had refused to include other original members of the Supremes in the tour, cutting off 23 scheduled appearances.
• Vanilla Ice

Flops in sports

• The European Hockey League
• The United States Football League
• The XFL

Flops in television

• The disastrous 1980 season of Saturday Night Live
• The BBC soap operas Triangles and Eldorado
• The relaunched ITV1 soap Crossroads
• Supertrain
• Pink Lady & Jeff
• Bette
• The Chevy Chase Show
• The Pat Sajak Show
• Thicke of the Night - Talk show with Alan Thicke
• The third season of Big Brother

Turkeys (Flops in theatre)

• 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue (1976) Lyrics by Alan J. Lerner, of "My Fair Lady" and "Brigadoon" fame; music by Leonard Bernstein, with important Broadway successes such as "On the Town," "Candide," and, most notably "West Side Story" to his credit. Closed after only seven performances. There was no cast recording made. An attempt was made to revive it in London in 1997. A reviewer commented "As exhumations go, this one had its bright moments."

Flops in film

A separate discussion of movie flops provides examples and rationales.

Commercial Flops

Commercial Failures in Aviation

These are aircraft which were technically sound, but failed in the marketplace. For aircraft which failed to work at all see 'Flops in science and engineering'.

• The Convair CV-880 and CV-990 - these aircraft were commercial disasters as they only offered five-abreast seating, and were easily outcompeted on price by the Boeing 720 which was based on an existing aircraft type.
• Supersonic transports: Boeing 2707, Tupolev Tu-144, arguably Concorde
• The Dassault Aviation Mercure - this aircraft had extremely limited range and as a result only ten were built for the French domestic airline Air Inter
• The Northrop F-20 Tigershark - this fighter aircraft was designed as a private venture for export, but failed utterly as foreign air forces wanted the more prestigious F-16 Fighting Falcon used by the USAF, despite the F-20 having superior performance and lower cost.

Automotive Flops

• Ford Motor Company's Edsel
• DeLorean automobile
• Electric cars - Ford Motor Company and General Motors, who only had lukewarm interest in the technology, have dropped production of their electric car models.
• Sinclair C5 - a battery powered car designed by Sir Clive Sinclair
• The Bricklin SV-1

Computing Flops

• The IBM 7030, also known as Stretch, was IBM's first attempt at building a supercomputer. Its actual performance was less than one third of its original specification. This resulted in IBM drastically dropping the price and losing money on every machine sold.
• The ILLIAC IV array processor supercomputer.
• Microsoft Windows 1.0 was a huge flop because its sales were low, it was very slow, needed a lot of memory for the time, and practically no software was ever written for it.
• Microsoft Bob.
• Apple has had flops, notably the Apple III, Apple Lisa, and arguably the Apple Newton.
• IBM had the IBM PS/2 and the IBM PCjr.
• IBM's 4" diameter floppy disk drive, introduced at about the same time as Seagate's 3" floppy, Hitachi's 3.25" floppy, and Sony's 3.5" floppy. (All but Sony's flopped).
• The Commodore Amiga was a flop in the United States (but was successful in Europe).
• Amiga CDTV - This early multimedia computer was overpriced and suffered from using the obsolete AmigaOS 1.3, when version 2.0 was already available.
• Data Play CD replacement disk technology. Cited by Jim Louderback as one of the "eight biggest tech flops ever".
• Go (pen computing corporation), cited by Jim Louderback as one of the "eight biggest tech flops ever".
• Intel expected the Itanium processor (referred to by detractors as "the Itanic") to revolutionize the microprocessor industry, but after 7 years of development and billions of dollars spent the first Itanium chip proved an utter technical and commercial failure. However the project still goes on, and Itanium 2 is an improvement. (Furthermore, the Itanium had the valuable side effect of killing competition; its development caused several competing chips, such as the Alpha and advanced version of the Sparc, to be abandoned by timid management).
• Iomega Clik! drive. Cited by Jim Louderback as one of the "eight biggest tech flops ever".
• Magic Cap, PDA... or something. Cited by Jim Louderback as one of the "eight biggest tech flops ever".
• In the 1980s, Commodore International became the first company to sell a million home computers. Hoping to repeat the success of its multimillion-selling VIC-20 and C-64 computers, it released the Commodore Plus/4 in 1984. It flopped. Commodore tried--and mostly failed--for 10 years to duplicate the C-64's success and went bankrupt in 1994.
• The INMOS Transputer, a brave attempt at a different way of computing - but now largely forgotten.
• WebTV. Internet delivery via television set and set-top box. Cited by Jim Louderback as one of the "eight biggest tech flops ever".
• The Sinclair QL an unsuccessful attempt by Sinclair Research to make a 16 bit computer in the mid 1980s

Video Game Flops

• Sega has had numerous flops in North America, for example the Sega Saturn, the Sega Nomad, the Sega Master System II and III, and the Sega 32X. (The Master System was successful in Europe and Brazil, and the Sega Saturn was successful in Japan.) The Sega Megadrive was not well received in Japan.
• Nintendo, not to be left behind, has produced the Nintendo Virtual Boy and light gun games.
• The Game.com handheld
• The Atari Jaguar console and the Atari Lynx handheld.
• Daikatana, the hyped and massively delayed video game from John Romero.
• The Atari 2600 version of E.T.
• The Amiga CD-32
• The Compact Disc-Interactive (CD-I) player, a "multimedia machine" jointly developed by Philips and Sony. It was considered overpriced and underpowered.
• The 3DO Multiplayer, a "multimedia machine" (it was marketed as a family entertainment device and not just a video game console) designed by R.J. Mical and the team behind the Amiga and marketed by Trip Hawkins, founder of Electronic Arts. It was introduced at $699, twice the price of most game consoles.
• The Apple Pippin, a games console based on MacOS and the PowerPC - was abandoned before production, clearly was unlikely to have succeeded.

Miscellaneous commercial flops

• The 1982 World's Fair in Knoxville, Tennessee
• The Betamax VCR system - after some initial sucess it was soundly beaten in the marketplace by VHS. Betamax failed in part because it was not an open standard.
• The Digital Compact Cassette - a format introduced by Philips, which lost out to Minidisc and CD-R
• DIVX, a take-off on DVD that required users to pay per viewing. Retail electronics giant and DIVX backer Circuit City lost about $200m over the fiasco.
• eBook devices. Between 1999 and 2002, a number of companies, notably Gemstar, jockeyed for control of this supposedly vast, lucrative market, believing that consumers would pay hardcover prices for a severely limited number of book titles in DRM-encrypted formats that tied each electronic copy to a unique serialized hardware device. In 2002 the "eBooks are dead" meme became widespread. In 2003, Gemstar pulled the plug on its servers and Barnes and Noble ceased offering eBook content of any kind.
• The Elcaset audio format - an attempt at a higher-quality replacement for the compact cassette by Sony.
• Lymeswold cheese (UK)
• The Millennium Dome - a commercial and public relations disaster, it now lies empty in Greenwich, England.
• New Coke. The Coca-Cola company changed the formula and taste of its flagship product, a universally successful drink whose name was almost synonymous with soft drinks. It was a marketing and public relations debacle, and the company had to backtrack and return to the older formula. However, when they went back to the original formula, demand for the classic taste grew to a greater extent than before New Coke, propelling Coca-Cola to a market lead over rival Pepsi - making the situation an unintentional success for Coca-Cola.
• The Tanganyika groundnut scheme, a plan by Clement Attlee's British government, financed by British tax-payers, to cultivate tracts of what is now Tanzania with peanuts.

Flops in science and engineering

A scientific flop may be something that took years of man-hours and a lot of money to complete (or perhaps never completed) and ended in failure.

Technical failures in aerospace

• The Brewster Buffalo - this World War II fighter aircraft turned out to be no match for Axis fighters
• The Bristol Brabazon airliner - overweight, underpowered and prone to metal fatigue
• The Europa rocket failed five times, without a single successful launch
• The Messerschmitt Me 163 was so dangerous that it killed more Luftwaffe pilots than Allied airmen.
• Most reusable space vehicles: Shuttle Buran, HOTOL, various NASA space planes, arguably the Space Shuttle.
• The Spruce Goose flying boat, Howard Hughes' white elephant.
• Project Vanguard (1958), the first attempt by the United States to put a satellite into orbit. The project managers insisted on using a new, civilian-designed, purpose-built rocket. There were repeated embarrassing crashes. After Sputnik, it was quickly decided to use proven military missile designs as the base for future space attempts.

Weapons

• The Chauchat light machine gun - the French weapon of WWI was notorious for its unreliability, prone to jamming and lack of precision manufacturing.
• The German Maus tank was so heavy (188 tons) that it was unusable
• The British SA80 rifle was notoriously unreliable.

Scientific projects

• Cold fusion - after much hype, claims of success proved false. (Research into cold fusion continues.)
• Project Mohole was a 1950s proposal to drill through Earth's crust and sample the material below, but it was never implemented because in the mid-1960s the planners realized it was impossible.

Civil engineering projects

• The Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapsed due to resonance in a gale force wind.

Political flops

USA Presidential campaigns

• Lyndon LaRouche has run in every single election since his federal indictment.
• David Duke, former Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan.
• Harold Stassen, former Republican governor of Minnesota, ran unsuccessfully for his party's nomination nine times, from 1948 to 1992.

French elections

• Lionel Jospin's 2002 presidential campaign was such a flop he retired from politics.
• The unnecessary dissolution of a favourable parliament (Assemblée nationale) in 1997 by President Jacques Chirac should have presaged an easy win for his partisans. They lost, yielding power to the opposition.

Canadian elections

• Kim Campbell led the governing Conservatives in the 1993 election campaign and succeeded in winning only two seats in the legislature.

UK elections

• Sir James Goldsmith's anti-EU Referendum Party failed to win a single seat in the 1997 general election, despite heavy publicity and a significant number of votes.
• The Labour Party's performance at the 1983 general election, led by Michael Foot. The manifesto was described as 'the longest suicide note in political history'.
• The Conservative Party's performance at the 1997 general election, and also at 2001 general election. In both General Elections the Conservatives were routed disasterously. Their showing was both times far worse than that of Michael Foot.

See also

• product management
• management
• new product development
• product

Referenced By