The 84 biggest flops, fails, and dead dreams of the 2010s, from the Fire phone and Google Glass to the undoing of net neutrality in the US
A decade of failures — The world never changes quite the way you expect. But at The Verge, we've had a front-row seat while technology …
Context & Ripple Effects
The Verge closes out the 2010s with an accounting of what didn't work — pairing its earlier 100-gadgets-of-the-decade rundown with the inverse ledger: Amazon's Fire Phone, Google Glass, and the FCC's undoing of net neutrality all filed under failure rather than progress.
The piece lands in a moment when the industry's own mood has turned: enthusiasm about startups has given way to cynicism, and companion retrospectives on Facebook and Twitter's decade of chasing size at society's cost frame the flop list as part of a broader end-of-decade judgment rather than a standalone nostalgia exercise.
First-order effects
- Amazon and Google see their most-cited missteps of the decade — the Fire Phone and Google Glass — canonized in a single widely-shared list that will anchor how these products are remembered.
- The FCC's net neutrality rollback is grouped with consumer product flops, folding a regulatory decision into the same failure narrative as hardware misses.
Second-order effects
- Rival outlets' competing retrospectives — the NYT's defining-moments piece with Zuckerberg, Snowden, and Phil Schiller versus The Verge's failure ledger — turn decade-end coverage into a contest over which narrative of the 2010s sticks.
- For companies still selling ambitious hardware, the list raises the reputational bar: launching a device now means risking placement in the next decade's equivalent roundup.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, decade-end accounting becomes a standing institution in tech media — a formal mechanism through which the industry's hype cycles and regulatory rollbacks are graded after the fact.
- Grouping policy decisions like net neutrality with product failures signals a press shift toward judging tech's institutional power, not just its gadgets, as the thing that can fail.
The trend: Decade-end retrospectives are consolidating the 2010s into a verdict-driven narrative where regulatory rollbacks and platform harms are scored as harshly as commercial product flops.