#product-failure

#product-failure

Over the last two decades, 45-year-old library assistant John Takis has witnessed some of the most important events in modern U.S. history. He lived through the cyber paranoia of Y2K. He saw the violent, fiery destruction of the World Trade Center broadcast on television. He heard the American government loudly declare war on Iraq not once, but twice. None of these dark, confusing experiences of the early 2000s, however, could prepare him for one of the strangest - and maybe most maligned - pop culture artifacts in recent memory: the Dilberito.

After initial testing in France, the product was released to the United States in 2006, an idea meant to appeal to the novelty of the beverage market at the time, with a name that fit the minimalist trend of the era. Even though several other unique Coke flavors from around the world might have been a hit in the U.S., Coca-Cola Blāk absolutely bombed with consumers and was pulled from shelves just two years after launching.

David Pierce, Allison Johnson, and Sean O'Kane discuss how the success of the Kindle led to Amazon's expanded hardware plans, the brewing fight with Apple over app store policies, the ways in which Bezos himself directed the product, and the astonishing speed with which the thing flopped. Only a few months after it launched, the Fire Phone could be had for less than a buck. People still didn't want it.