The new health insurance exchanges opened across the country on Oct. 1, but few of the websites that accompanied them were ready to do business. Nowhere have the problems been more severe and enduring than at HealthCare.gov, the site for the federally operated exchanges in 34 states. (Andrew Harrer / Bloomberg)
When Facebook finally made its long-awaited initial public offering on May 18, 2012, orders were delayed and bungled by the Nasdaq exchange. The next day, to the horror of early buyers, the stock started a long slide that would cut its price in half. It took almost a year for Facebook shares to finally return to their IPO price. (Justin Sullivan / Getty Images)
When Medicare added a prescription drug benefit in October 2005, it did so without an online marketplace -- the site wasn’t ready until the following month, and even then it buckled under the demand. Medicare’s call center also had problems with long waits and dropped calls, as well as a high percentage of inaccurate responses to seniors’ questions. (Pablo Martinez Monsivais / Associated Press)
Google sought to transform the TV-watching experience in late 2010 with a set-top box that could tune in programs from either the Internet or the networks. But it couldn’t deliver on its promise, largely because a number of major TV programmers blocked their on-demand episodes from appearing on Google TV devices. Buggy software didn’t help. (Paul Sakuma / Associated Press)
A man rides a shared bike rented through the Citi Bike program in Brooklyn, N.Y., on Oct. 4. The program was beset by mechanical problems and overwhelmed by demand when it launched in May, but it has apparently righted itself since then. (Spencer Platt / Getty Images)
Sometimes a product just isn’t good enough to capitalize on the opportunity that the market presents. One good example was the Ford Edsel, which was just too ugly even for a car-hungry America in the late 1950s. Another is the smokeless Premier cigarettes that RJ Reynolds introduced in 1988 but dropped within a few months, writing off a huge investment in R&D. As one pundit put it, “It doesn’t matter if a cigarette doesn’t produce smoke if the most basic elements aren’t there. If you can’t light a cigarette and it tastes vile, then nobody will want it.” (TobaccoProducts.org)
Some of the worst launches involved products that tried to improve on a successful formula. New Coke is probably the most famous example -- no offense to Crystal Pepsi. More recently, Apple decided in 2012 to replace Google’s wildly popular Google Maps application on its iPhones with a revamped version of its mapping software, which proved to be unreliable and incomplete. This photo shows a runway at Fairbanks International Airport in Alaska, where Apple Maps guided users seeking directions to the airport’s terminal. Apple CEO Tim Cook soon apologized to customers, and Apple worked steadily to improve its app. Today, it’s more popular among iPhone users than Google Maps. (Associated Press)
The problems at HealthCare.gov stem in part from a design choice made by the Obama administration that caused a wicked traffic bottleneck on the site. There’s ample precedent for such moves, though. One example is Electronic Arts’ decision to require users of the latest version of SimCity, a popular computer game, to be continuously connected to EA’s servers online. Predictably, the servers couldn’t handle the initial demand, leaving thousands of gamers unable to play the game they’d just purchased. The company said the game was meant to be a social experience, but critics accused EA of being disingenuous. The real reason to require gamers to connect to EA’s servers, they said, was to guard the software against piracy. The company eased the problems by adding server capacity, but the complaints endured. (Electronic Arts)
When Johnny Carson left NBC’s “The Tonight Show” in 1992, rival networks saw an opening to elevate new hosts to the title of late-night king. Fox’s choice was Chevy Chase, a former “Saturday Night Live” star who’d established himself in Hollywood as a comic actor. But Chase was ill-prepared for the demands on late-night TV; he was a nervous host on a tedious show, which Fox canceled in its second month. (Steve Schapiro / Fox)
