If failure is defined by not getting articles written about you in Quora / TC then certainly.<p>Re dating sites: Try OkCupid / POF. Or the up and comer LikaALot.<p>"Social recommendations", seriously are you insane? Do you have any idea how much business is driven via social recommendations? If social recommendations didn't work then amazon would have no 'people who bought, also bought...' If you had a company that could make those things 10% better you'd have a truckload of money.<p>Anything that makes programming "easy for non-programmers or businesspeople":
You might want to ask a little company called Microsoft about that and how much money they make by making it easy to program. Perhaps you've heard of something called ruby / python, that offload massive amounts of intellectual capacity off of programmers. Seriously, how many ruby programmers know assembly? How many companies derive incredible amounts of money from things like profilers, etc. Barely, anyone programs computers anymore.<p>Anything involving paying people to look at ads:
You might want to ask the hundreds of companies that run things called 'focus groups' about that.<p>Anything that promises to make email a thing of the past:
You've probably got an IM client on your desktop, might want to ask 37 signals about a product called Campfire. There's also that company called Twitter.
I would be hesitant to draw far-fetched conclusions from this. Often an idea persistently fails until someone finally does them right and then it doesn't fail anymore. One example is document synchronization; people justified the consistent failure of synchronization solutions with all sorts of explanations (including the "people just don't need it" joker card) until Dropbox came along, did it right, and now synchronization suddenly doesn't seem to be a "dead on arrival" idea. There are plenty of other examples.<p>It's easy to justify the failure of a product or solution by blaming the circumstances, like the "market not being ready" or "people don't need it" or "the market is too small" etc. Often, it's just that the product sucks, which might or might not be the fault of the creators.<p>TL;DR: Ideas only keep failing until someone does them right.
It's interesting how little value the answers to this question seem to have.<p>dating/t-shirts - Lots of people date and buy t shirts online. I don't get this.<p>social or mobile _____ - How long have these been pursued? Most people don't even have smartphones yet and the first and only social thing they use is facebook. Patience.<p>grocery delivery - I can get groceries delivered in my area (melbourne) by one of several big companies. 10% or 1% of a one of the biggest markets is not failure, is it?<p>Maybe it's not possible to answer this question in a useful way.
Micropayments is a subject of interest to me, because my current hybrid honours-project-slash-startup work is in approximately that field.<p>The business model I'm following most closely resembles the now-defunct Contenture; Readability is similar but not identical. Obviously I have some additional technology secret sauce or there wouldn't be a project in it to satisfy university requirements.<p>To me the main failing of conventional tipjars is the requirement to manually tip the recipient. To my eyes Tipjoy was the first real twist on this -- that you could commit to tip before paying -- but otherwise it was the same as Flattr and the dozens of others that have come and gone in this space. Flattr's twist is OK, but I think imposes even more potential cognitive overhead in terms of "I really like this site, I need to find more articles to flattr".<p>I think that the Contenture / Readability / my-company-name-here model works better because it requires no thought on the part of the customer. Payments are divvied up automatically. No transaction cost ("Do I tip or not?") is imposed on the user.<p>Mind you, my most imposing business obstacle is getting a merchant account. Businesses which take money from party A and pay some portion to party B are basically viewed as kryptonite crossed with rat poison by the banking sector.<p>Fair enough, too -- such businesses have statistically high rates of complaints, failures and money laundering shenanigans.
Things that people don't actually want.<p>But there are many examples of things and markets which at first didn't seem all that promising. But then someone made something slightly different (or radically different) and it actually made users happy.<p>So just keep trying.
One thing stood out to me:<p>Semantic Search<p>1) It might be that it is hard for mortals to formulate a semantic query<p>2) <i>AI is hard</i><p>That struck me as a problem that might be worth working on. Presumably we're being paid to solve hard problems that might have value. If someone can improve search by tackling the AI problem and make it relatively easy for people to use, they could push search to the next level.
Wow! I would never say something would fail because it has failed in the past. Things fail because they're not done right. Demand can be created (and destroyed). This list is a list of opportunities IMHO.
My first reaction was that unlike most Quora questions, the answer summary is quite good on this. When I looked at it more, though, I realized that it didn't distinguish at all between more-popular and less-popular answers: the wisdom of the crowd (such as it is) has been lost. Also, credit for the answers isn't included; and neither are links ... so it's still far from ideal.
Actually, quite a few of these ideas persistently succeed. Dating sites, t-shirts, rss readers -- how many times have those worked since the dawn of the Internet?
All the answers that said "its already been done" are not quite right. Its often possible to do it better and eat their lunch. Look at DropBox. Lots of mountable-cloud-storage solutions existed but they were (are) fragile and expensive.
Something tells me the very question is wrong. If you think avoiding failure = avoiding bad ideas, then that tell me something about you: you place too much an importance on the idea. If you're already thinking this way, eh, I can't help but feel you're already starting on the wrong path.<p>The better question would perhaps be about a list of common reasons for failed startups. I don't think "having a bad startup idea" would be anywhere on the top of that list. Or for that matter, even "repeating a failed idea" wouldn't occur on the list.
There are so many examples prooving that the type of shallow analysis given in the first answer is pointless. I thought it was finally understood that it is not the idea that matters but the execution. According to this type of analysis, google was doomed from the start, dropbox as well, Android dito, etc. etc.<p>My advise would be to ignore such type of answer and focus on making something people want and generates traction. The author of the answer is too narrow minded and lacks imagination and creativity.
There is a difference between a bad 'idea' and a bad implementation of an idea.<p>Early search engines were pretty bad (Lycos, Altavista etc) - why? because the idea was bad, or the implementation was bad?<p>I would say that if all dating sites fail in the same way then maybe there is a brilliant opportunity to build one that works...which is what google did with search engines.
I think it's worthy to define failure first.<p>Company no longer exists? Completely bankrupt? Burn rate continues to increase? Point is, even if a company goes bankrupt you can still can technically still sell it. Does a failure constitue that all assets of a business are completely no worth anything?<p>Side question - how do you actually close a company?
<i>Anything that makes programming "easy for non-programmers or businesspeople"</i><p>Hypercard.<p>Speaking of which, why did Hypercard die in 2004? With the explosion in computer use by so many 'normals', I would think adoption would be huge. I'm not aware of any web-based technology that would enable Hypercard level of minimalist, user-friendly programming.