Perseverance doesn’t always pay off for companies – sometimes it’s better to ‘fail fast’

Photo: New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) – Slack Direct Offering – June 22, 2019. Photo credit: Ajay Suresh via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 2.0. Article by Scott Friend and Kumar Rakesh Ranjan. The Conversation – April 27, 2026.

Across the business world, companies often double down on struggling ideas, retreating only after clear evidence shows they won’t work. A recent spectacular example was Meta’s metaverse push. After the organization invested US$80 billion over several years, it announced changes in March 2026 that all but abandoned its grand strategy. But many companies are following the opposite approach of quickly walking away from failure instead of blindly sticking to a vision. Google ended its cloud gaming service Stadia when it failed to take off, choosing instead to reuse the technology elsewhere. Mercedes abandoned its zero-sidepod F1 concept once it clearly hit a competitive dead end. And Slack transitioned from a failed gaming app to a ubiquitous intra-office messaging platform. […]

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