The 20 Biggest Software Flops of All Time
Software is a funny thing. You can't touch it, but you can certainly pay for it. It weighs nothing, but it takes dozens or even hundreds of people to make. And sometimes, it just doesn't work.
No matter how detailed the specs, how solid the market research, and how optimized the code is, there are always winners and losers in software. Sometimes, a competitor comes to market with something better. Other times, unforeseen circumstances render a program useless or outdated. On occasion, companies just screw up a program to a point where no patch can fix it.
Let's crawl through the annals of computing history to showcase software releases that went horribly wrong. Some of the biggest names in the industry show up here—Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft are well-represented—which proves the existence of second chances. And third chances, and fourth, if you play your cards right. For other developers on this list, though, a software flop put them out of business.
In the early days of video gaming, the cost of software was high, because it came in cartridge format. Unlike cheap floppy disks, companies such as Atari had to shell out for chips and casings for every game they made.
So when the company produced 5 million copies of a game based on Steven Spielberg's massive hit movie, it represented a serious sunk cost. The game, produced in a staggeringly short four weeks by veteran producer Howard Scott Warshaw, wasn't very good, and less than half of those 5 million copies were sold. This helped usher in the great video-game crash of 1983, which would take the industry years to recover from.
In 2014, the (now-defunct) Microsoft Xbox Entertainment Studios chased rumors that Atari dumped 14 truckloads of unsold cartridges and
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