The 13 Worst Design Failures in Modern History: From Apple Pippin to Google Glass

By Dan Avery

Innovation rarely strikes like lightning. It's usually the product of much trial and error. Embracing failure as an essential part of success is the key to a true breakthrough. That's the mindset that pushed psychologist Samuel West to open the Museum of Failure, now on view at Industry City in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. West is a corporate consultant who helps companies remove roadblocks to innovation. "I’ve been consuming these trite success stories from entrepreneurs for 10 to 15 years in my research," he explains. "They always paint this really rosy picture. But one reason innovation doesn't happen is this fear of failure." The 159-plus items on display in the museum include some real nostalgia—from the Sony Betamax and Google Glass to handheld record players. "Ninety percent of startups fail. Ninety percent of innovation fails," West says. "Its nice to destigmatize failure."

The museum has staged exhibitions in West's native Sweden, as well as Los Angeles, Shanghai, Paris, Taipei, and beyond. Not every failure is represented physically. When West couldn't get his hands on one of the TV dinners that Colgate manufactured in the 1980s, he created an exact replica. The oldest item name-checked in the Museum of Failure is the Vasa, a 17th-century Swedish warship that sank minutes after leaving the harbor on her maiden voyage. "They wanted the craziest ship in Europe so they added two floors of cannons," West explains. "But that made it too heavy and the ship became unstable. They tried telling the king, but he wouldn't listen."

Some corporations, like Microsoft, have even sent workers to check the museum out. "IKEA has been very supportive," he adds. The Swedish furniture company made it into the museum with its line of inflatable furniture. But bad design isn't always the root of failure. "There are several themes that emerge in the museum," West says. "Poor design is obvious, and not considering the end user. But sometimes a product is just overhyped and can't possibly meet expectations."

One of his favorite displays is an early digital camera from Kodak. "They invented the concept in the ’70s but didn't understand how to get away from their standard business model with film," West says. Leadership hubris can also be a factor, he added. "When management doesn't listen to engineers, or even consumers, they end up in an echo chamber."

And sometimes it's completely out of your hands. "When something disruptive comes in the market, like the iPod, it has shockwaves in other products and services," West explains.

Below, AD surveys the 13 biggest design fails in modern history that are on display at the Museum of Failure.

Colgate is synonymous with toothpaste—apparently an executive thought that was enough to get the company into TV dinners. As the story goes, in the early 1980s, Colgate was losing out in the personal care market to Proctor & Gamble. So it diversified with a line of Colgate Kitchen Entrees marketed to college students and working parents. But consumers couldn't connect the dots between clean teeth and tasty beef lasagna and the line was soon pulled. Colgate doesn't seem to take this failure in stride: The company reportedly removed all mentions of the Kitchen Entrees from its website.

Being first to market isn't always a barometer of success: In the early days of home video, Betamax tapes were the dominant platform. But Sony failed to understand what people would use them for. "It chose to make smaller, neater tapes that lasted for an hour," UK journalist Jack Schofield wrote in The Guardian. "Whereas the VHS manufacturers used basically the same technology with a bulkier tape that lasted two hours." Betamax might have had superior picture quality, but a VHS tape could record an entire movie or baseball game.

For all its success with computers and phones, Apple doesn't have a gaming console. Not anymore, anyway. Launched in 1996, the Apple Pippin (named for the tart cultivar, not the NBA basketball player) was manufactured and marketed by Japanese toy company Bandi. But it cost $400 more than the comparable Nintendo 64 and had very few games available. When Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, the Pippin was one of several products that ceased production.

Excitement for Google Glass was at fever pitch in 2013, when a prototype was introduced that enabled wearers to surf the web via voice command. The technology was never perfected, though, and between the $1,500 price tag and concerns about privacy violations, the public never embraced it. Users were dubbed "Glassholes" and the devices were banned in casinos, locker rooms, movie theaters, and elsewhere. Sales of Google Glass were finally discontinued on March 15, 2023.

While E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial was one of the biggest blockbusters of the 1980s, this tie-in for the Atari 2600 is considered one of the worst video games of all time. It didn't help that game designer Howard Scott Warshaw, who had success adapting Raiders of the Lost Ark for Atari, had just five-and-a-half weeks to develop this one. Users found the game repetitive and hard to play, and the graphics were subpar, even for 1983. Atari's E.T was so reviled it became part of pop culture urban lore, with millions of unsold cartridges allegedly buried in a New Mexico landfill. (Actually, this myth has a kernel of truth to it.)

Imagine a smartphone that couldn't make calls, receive text messages, or send emails. TwitterPeek, a $100 handheld launched in November 2009, could only send and receive tweets. And it didn't even do that well. The screen only displayed the first 20 characters of a message; reading a full tweet required a lot of slow scrolling and you couldn't access any linked websites. Most importantly, anyone with a smartphone could already access Twitter. In 2009, Gizmodo described the TweetPeek as "so dumb it makes my brain hurt." Support for all Peek devices ended three years later.

Sony's second entry on this list, the MiniDisc was marketed in 1992 as way to enjoy the crystal clear sound quality of a CD without the risk of scratches or skips. At $500, though, it was too expensive, and there were few albums released on the platform. By the late 1990s, the arrival of recordable CDs and MP3 players meant the MiniDisc's fate was sealed.

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After Coca-Cola reformulated its signature soft drink in 1985, the outcry was so swift that it brought back "Coke Classic" after just three months. Countless taste tests had established consumers preferred New Coke to the old version, and even to Pepsi. So what happened? "Coke had spent more than a hundred years convincing the North American population that its product was an integral part of their lives, their very identities," Snopes wrote. "Taste be damned: To do away with Coca-Cola was to rip something vital from the American soul."

A perfect storm led to the defeat of this two-wheeled transport, from the overhype preceding its arrival in 2001 to the mammoth ego of inventor Dean Kamen, who refused to share details with the press, regulators, or even investors. Kamen claimed the Segway "will be to the car what the car was to the horse and buggy." But the scooter was too slow and unsafe for great distances, and it was never clear who its intended user was. (Paul Blart: Mall Cop didn't help its image.) Only about 140,000 Segways were sold before production was discontinued in 2020.

After Apple introduced the iPod in 2001, Microsoft took five years to roll out its own digital music player. While the Zune had a larger screen, a radio tuner and even the ability to share songs, it simply lacked the "cool" factor of the iPod. In addition, its internal clock wasn't designed for leap years. So, at midnight on December 31, 2008, tens of thousands of Zunes just froze up. Microsoft kept trying to make Zune happen, dumping tens of millions of dollars into marketing campaigns. But when it ceased production in 2011, the Zune had barely an eighth of the iPod's market share.

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Scented candles are great. But what Proctor & Gamble launched in 2004 was more like a high-def air fresher or a CD player for your nose. Febreze's Scentstories device held five complementary scents that would alternate every half hour to create an aromatic "symphony." Consumers weren't clear on the concept, though, and the clunky design seemed like too much trouble to deal with. Even spokesperson Shania Twain, who had signature Scentstories like "Shania's Wishes for Spring," couldn't help sales. "It paved the way for so many things moving forward," a Proctor & Gamble executive told Daily Dot. "Had we not done Scentstories, we might not have understood how consumers are using fragrances at home."

Volvo tried to modernize the bicycle industry in the early ’80s by building frames out of injection-molded plastic rather than metal. But manufacturing costs were much higher than anticipated and the Itera's final price tag was twice what Volvo had planned. In addition, the engineering team apparently didn't realized bicycles are usually kept outside. "They melted and cracked in the heat," West says.

Would you spend $700 on a juicer? When raw-foods crusader Doug Evans pitched his Wi-Fi-enabled cold-press machine, the Juicero, he promised to do for juicers what Steve Jobs did for personal computers. Initially, the Silicon Valley startup impressed venture capitalists, pulling in nearly $120 million from investors like Google, Kleiner Perkins, and Campbell Soup. But the Juicero didn't really juice fruit. Users inserted proprietary pouches filled with pre-crushed fruit and vegetables into the device, which then extracted the liquid. These "produce packs" had to be ordered from Juicero and couldn't be frozen or filled with preservative, so distribution was always a problem. Also, people realized you could just squeeze the pouches with your hand and get the same result. After just a year and a half, Juicero went out of business in 2017.

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