Best of all is to fail in a non-public way: I can't find the quote right now, but Jobs has said (roughly) that he's as proud of the things they've developed and

Best of all is to fail in a non-public way: I can't find the quote right now, but Jobs has said (roughly) that he's as proud of the things they've developed and then haven't shipped as the things they have. Presumably some really good products that just weren't right at the time for Apple to bring to market. The example that comes to mind for me is Microsoft's recent Kin phones: because of the sunk-cost fallacy, they apparently felt like they had to bring something to market, even though everybody apparently knew the product wasn't good. So they made a few bucks back (not many!) from Kin sales, but got a ton of harder-to-quantify negative publicity from this very public failure. If they'd have just killed the project the day before public reveal and done something internally with the lessons learned, they'd be far better off.