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 …
The Verge
Context & Ripple Effects
The Verge closes out the decade with a companion piece to its earlier gadgets-of-the-decade rundown: where that list catalogued what worked, this one catalogs what didn't — 84 entries spanning Amazon's Fire phone, Google Glass, and the FCC's rollback of net neutrality. Read together, they form a deliberate hits-and-misses ledger rather than a standalone takedown.
The timing matters because the mood was already set: a May piece on the tech community's slide from enthusiasm into cynicism argued the industry had stopped getting excited about new things, and the NYT's defining-moments oral history with Zuckerberg, Snowden, and Phil Schiller framed the decade as contested rather than triumphant.
First-order effects
Amazon and Google end the decade with their flagship hardware bets — the Fire phone and Google Glass — formally entered into the failure record, while the FCC's net neutrality repeal stands as the list's major regulatory entry rather than a product one.
Readers get an explicit counterweight to year-end best-of coverage: the same outlet that ranked the 100 defining gadgets is now ranking the dead dreams, changing what counts as the decade's canonical tech narrative.
Second-order effects
Failure retrospectives like this feed directly into the cynicism dynamic The Next Web documented mid-year — each catalogued flop makes the next hyped launch harder to sell on faith alone.
If decade-end accounting becomes standard practice, the 2020s version will likely weigh social and regulatory damage — net neutrality's repeal, platform harms — as heavily as commercial flops like the Fire phone and Google Glass, shifting how the industry's success gets judged.
The inclusion of a policy rollback among product failures points toward a structural blurring: regulatory decisions treated as part of the same innovation record as hardware bets, raising the stakes for bodies like the FCC in the next decade's retrospectives.
The trend: Tech's self-assessment is shifting from celebrating launches to auditing failures and social costs, with decade-end lists becoming the industry's formal record of both.
Was quite offended to see a project I co-founded showing up at #36 on this list of biggest tech flops of the decade. Only 36! Put us in the top ten you cowards! To be fair there is some exceptional competition there https://www.theverge.com/...
“Eventually, guilt overwhelmed Nguyen and he pulled the game from iOS and Android, saying it had become too popular and too addictive for its own good. Flappy Bird flapped its last and quickly flopped out of existence.” https://www.theverge.com/...
Bit surprised there are only 10 Google products on this list. Also, remember when chatbots were the imminent next massive platform shift? *nostalgic sniff* https://www.theverge.com/...
The Verge is one of just a handful of tech outlets willing to call a duck a duck when revolving door regulators are involved. Most others are busy playing he said, she said stenography patty cake. https://twitter.com/...
I actually read through all this. It's pretty comprehensive and sobering. We laughed about http://pets.com/ way back when but it doesn't seem like things have changed that much. “The 84 biggest flops, fails, and dead dreams of the decade in tech” https://www.theverge.com/...
Lots of flops on this list but hard not to be impressed by Apple's process of finding product-market fit for Apple Watch from a $10K instantly obsolete luxury watch for the rich to effectively a more feature rich version of FitBit. Excellent pivot. https://www.theverge.com/...
What's on it and of course their order is as arbitrary as any list but it's a fun read. Lots of VR/AR stuff, many Google projects, plenty of reminders how tricky innovation can be. https://www.theverge.com/...
Not surprised to see a few fintech related flops here, but no mention of Clinkle? Come on. In case we have forgotten... https://techcrunch.com/... https://twitter.com/...
Practically the entire @verge staff pitched in for this gigantic end-of-decade guide to the hilarious and disastrous flops of the 2010s. We dug deep for this — remember the JooJoo? Heck, even the @alexcas_io illustration is a flop! But at least that one's intentional. :-) https:…