The Biggest Tech Product Flops of the 2010s

In the US, 20 percent of small businesses can't make it a year, half are dead in five years and a full 70 percent can't make it past a decade, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Success is even harder if that business is all about one particular product — especially if that product is tech-related.

Look at companies like Juicero, which couldn't launch a smart juicer even with $120 million. Or Pono, a digital media player and music download service for audiophiles that Neil Young just couldn't quite make happen. Crowdfunding has many tales of spectacular failure, like the Zano Drone, which earned $3 million on Kickstarter but couldn't actually ... fly.

Even big names like Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon — the so-called Frightful Five of Tech — have their fair share of shameful screw-ups in the tech product space.

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That's what we're here to reflect on: 10 years of tech product failure. Not the small ones like those above, but the products and services you came to love, or wanted to love, or can't understand why they didn't get any love. Some are great ideas that never went anywhere. Some were incredibly flawed products that never should have made it past prototyping. A few are glorious vaporware — products rumored, promised, or even guaranteed, but that never came to be.

Apple AirPower Wireless Charging Mat

Apple's good at delivering high-quality products most of the time. But occasionally it over promises, as it did with the AirPower in 2017. It was supposed to be the ultimate wireless charger mat for Apple products, powerful enough to charge an iPhone X, Apple Watch, and AirPods simultaneously. It took another 18 months or so before the much-delayed, destined-to-be-overpriced mat was cancelled because it would "not achieve our high standards," according to Apple.

While you can expect a whole separate story from us on the major smartphone failures of the past decade, there are a couple that are just so bad they must be included here. Amazon's first and only foray into the space was 2014's Fire Phone. It was more than a phone — with 3D capabilities, it was a way for Amazon to help you showroom the world, and thus increase its own retail sales. Which some found offensive at best, especially in a $650 device that only worked with AT&T. Amazon, never one to shy away from pulling a loser off the shelf, killed the handset off in less than a year after taking a $170 million hit.

Research In Motion owned the mobile space in the first decade of the new millennium. But by 2010 it was trying desperately to stay relevant. The PlayBook tablet was RIM's answer to the iPad and Kindle Fire. But it just couldn't compete because BlackBerry didn't have the apps; thousands of units shipped to retailers and never left the shelves, despite some big price cuts. RIM — by then renamed BlackBerry Ltd. — killed the device by mid-2013.

It also shipped BlackBerry 10 that year, a mobile operating system it hoped would give iOS and Android a run. It even had 100,000 apps — including 28,000 Android apps that apparently ran like they were on dial-up — but it was no use. BlackBerry 10 ran on a few phones, the last one being the BlackBerry Leap in 2015, but it couldn't bring back the heyday of the "CrackBerry." 

Once the most funded Kickstarter project in history (as of 2014), the Coolest Cooler — a cooler full of gadgets like a blender, wireless speaker, and USB for charging devices — turned out to be mediocre at best. By 2016, Coolest was out of money and couldn't ship all its orders, a saga that continued through 2018. Coolest still has it for sale on its website for $399.99, though.

Google's rivalry with Facebook pre-dates the past decade, but really took off with the launch of Google Buzz in 2010, an attempt to bring some web-based social networking to Android and iOS users. Google killed it in October 2011, so it could concentrate on Google+.

What a waste or resources. Despite trying to graft this free social tool onto actual useful and popular Google properties like Blogger, Gmail and YouTube, Google+ never caught on. Worse, as the service was heading into the sunset, it was revealed that a bug in G+ in early 2018 exposed 500,000 profiles, and Google tried to keep it hush-hush. Then another bug came along that pushed up the timetable to kill the service from August 2019 to April. Google+ for the enterprise lives on, but the consumer version joins Friendster and MySpace in the hall of failed social networks.