Failure

"Fail" redirects here. For other uses, see Fail (disambiguation) and Failure (disambiguation).

The 1895 Montparnasse derailment in Paris.

Failure is the state or condition of not meeting a desirable or intended objective, and may be viewed as the opposite of success. Product failure ranges from failure to sell the product to fracture of the product, in the worst cases leading to personal injury, the province of forensic engineering.

Criteria

The criteria for failure are heavily dependent on context of use, and may be relative to a particular observer or belief system. A situation considered to be a failure by one might be considered a success by another, particularly in cases of direct competition or a zero-sum game. Similarly, the degree of success or failure in a situation may be differently viewed by distinct observers or participants, such that a situation that one considers to be a failure, another might consider to be a success, a qualified success or a neutral situation.

It may also be difficult or impossible to ascertain whether a situation meets criteria for failure or success due to ambiguous or ill-defined definition of those criteria. Finding useful and effective criteria, or heuristics, to judge the success or failure of a situation may itself be a significant task.

Commercial failures

A commercial failure is a product or company that does not reach expectations of success.

Most of the items listed below had high expectations, significant financial investments, and/or widespread publicity, but fell far short of success. Due to the subjective nature of "success" and "meeting expectations," there can be disagreement about what constitutes a "major flop."

• For flops in computer and video gaming, see list of commercial failures in computer and video gaming
• For company failures related to the 1997–2001 dot-com bubble, see dot-com company
• Box-office bomb

Sometimes, "commercial failures" can receive a cult following.

In marketing

Marketing researchers have distinguished between outcome and process failures. An outcome failure is a failure to obtain a good or service at all; a process failure is a failure to receive the good or service in an appropriate or preferable way. Thus, a person who is only interested in the final outcome of an activity would consider it to be an outcome failure if the core issue has not been resolved or a core need is not met. A process failure occurs, by contrast, when, although the activity is completed successfully, the customer still perceives the way in which the activity is conducted to be below an expected standard or benchmark.

In science

If you want to succeed, double your failure rate.

Thomas J. Watson

Wired magazine editor Kevin Kelly explains that a great deal can be learned from things going wrong unexpectedly, and that part of science's success comes from keeping blunders "small, manageable, constant, and trackable". He uses the example of engineers and programmers who push systems to their limits, breaking them to learn about them. Kelly also warns against creating a culture (e.g., school system) that punishes failure harshly, because this inhibits a creative process, and risks teaching people not to communicate important failures with others (e.g., null results).

Internet memes

"Epic fail" redirects here. For the House episode, see Epic Fail (House).

During the early 2000s, the term fail began to be used as an interjection in the context of Internet memes. The interjection fail and the superlative form epic fail expressed derision and ridicule for mistakes deemed "eminently mockable". According to linguist Ben Zimmer, the most probable origin of this usage is Blazing Star (1998), a Japanese video game whose game over message was translated into English as "You fail it". The comedy website Fail Blog, launched in January 2008, featured photos and videos captioned with "fail" and its variations. The #fail hashtag is used on the microblogging site Twitter to indicate contempt or displeasure, and the image that formerly accompanied the message that the site was overloaded is referred to as the "fail whale".

The term "miserable failure" has also been popularized as a result of a widely known "Google bombing," which caused Google searches for the term to turn up the White House biography of George W. Bush.

See also

• Cascading failure
• Disaster
• Error
• Fail-safe
• Failure analysis

• Failure mode
• Failure rate
• Governance failure
• Market failure
• Murphy's law

• Normal accidents
• Setting up to fail
• Single point of failure
• Structural failure
• System accident

References

Further reading

• Perrow, Charles. Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies. New York: Basic Books, 1983. Paperback reprint, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999. ISBN 0-691-00412-9 Search this book on .
• Sandage, Scott A. Born Losers: A History of Failure in America. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2005. ISBN 0-674-01510-X Search this book on ., ISBN 0-674-02107-X Search this book on .

External links

• Designing Building Failures
• Zimmer, Ben (August 7, 2009), "How Fail Went From Verb to Interjection", The New York Times Magazine.
• Association for the Study of Failure from Japan

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