Here are the five biggest software flops in history as compiled by PCMag and real money pokie.
- E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982)
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, courtesy of online casino for real money.
- Lotus Jazz (1985)
To be fair, Lotus 1-2-3 was one of the elite productivity products of the 1980s. The spreadsheet program was a huge selling point for IBM PCs, letting users collate and compare data faster and more efficiently than ever before. It made Lotus a huge success—making more money than Microsoft at the time. And then it tried to come up with a follow-up and suffered one of the worst sophomore slumps in computer history. Jazz was a productivity suite folded into a word processor, spreadsheet, and database program for Macintosh systems. Released in 1985, it retailed for a staggering $595 and came on four floppy disks that had to be switched and swapped while you ran the program—and it was a tremendous bomb in the marketplace.
- GNU Hurd (1990–Present)
Unix was first developed in the 1970s. In 1990, the GNU Project decided it was time to replace Unix with a free offering called GNU Hurd(Opens in a new window). Thirty-plus years after work on the project started, GNU Hurd has yet to be released as a working operating system for public use. It wasn’t a complete loss, as many of the components from GNU were moved over to create the Linux operating system, but Hurd is a great example of how software development is fluid and never-ending.
- Copland (1994–1996)
Apple tried and failed to replace its aging System 7 operating system with a new OS that was more stable and supported multitasking. By 1994, work on System 8 had begun under the Copland codename, but the project soon fell into ruin. Ballooned by bad project management and feature creep, Copland became a collection of features rather than a working OS. The Copland project was officially canceled in 1996, but it wasn’t all bad for Apple. The company went out and acquired Steve Jobs’ company NeXT and third-party system enhancements to make a new operating system. Features originally developed for Copland were eventually added to future OS releases, and the foundation of the modern macOS was built.
- Microsoft Bob (1995)
It’s undeniable that Microsoft has been one of the leading forces in how we use computers, but you also can’t deny that much of Windows was swiped wholesale from Apple’s macOS. When Bill Gates and company decided to do their own spin on a user-friendly operating system in 1995, it proved to be an utter disaster. Microsoft Bob was a bizarrely cheerful newbie-focused OS that retailed for nearly $100 and featured a number of loquacious “guides” that chatted you through your experience. It was heavily advertised, but the hardware requirements were high, and the included productivity applications were primitive. A bit of trivia: The widely reviled Comic Sans typeface was originally designed for Bob but never used.