Regardless of one’s opinion of Socialism/Communism in its political or social aspects, I think most people today would agree that command economies have proven to be a dismal failure at providing prosperity.
Going back to the OP’s theme, I can think of several businesses from the dot.com boom that were potentially good ideas that failed because they were executed very poorly, or alternatively they were un-executable with the technology that existed at the time. Yahoo stands out; it still exists, but compared to Google it is minuscule because it was managed by people who had no vision. Ditto every other search engine from the period.
There was a tonne of fashion and beauty startups in the dot.com years that might have been popular nowadays - fashion is high-margin and easy to send through the post - but they failed at the time because they were badly-run and the market wasn’t there. Putting it brutally the internet was not awash with teenage girls in 1998, and furthermore the modern online economy relies on a certain amount of synergy between Instagram, Twitter, and e-commerce, which again didn’t exist until relatively recently.
Streaming TV and movies wasn’t practical until broadband became widespread. eToys and Pets.com were perhaps overspecialised but if they had been implemented on a smaller scale ten years later they would not have been inherently worthless. The bubble also coincided with the first wave of popular online first person shooters, such as Quake III and Unreal Tournament; from a business point of view they were good ideas executed well, but the huge popularity of e-sports has demonstrated that they could have been executed even more well.
It’s debatable whether a good idea that can’t be executed with current or near-future technology is a good idea executed poorly, or a bad idea. Then you have things like NASA’s NERVA rocket, which was a good idea executed well in a political climate that was hostile to it. Conversely the attempts by both the United States and the Soviet Union to build nuclear-powered bombers were bad ideas executed at least to a functional level.
I can think of a few bad ideas that were executed well. Concorde and the Channel Tunnel spring to mind. They were extremely successful engineering projects that made sense twenty years before they were completed. Concorde made sense when air travel was exclusive and expensive, but in 1976 the mass market wanted a cheap holiday in Benidorm and they didn’t care if there was seat-back catering; the Channel Tunnel made sense when people went on the ferry to France, but a year after it opened EasyJet was founded and from that point onwards it was cheaper to fly to Paris than take the train, and easier if you didn’t live near London.
Now I shall hit “submit reply” and wait for a Server 504 error.
The hew - unused and unusable Berlin airport needs a mention here, especially since we tend to think of those Germans as being so efficient - read this and laugh
Sometimes there are also good ideas, well-executed, that just are unlucky. Sometimes you weigh the probabilities, consider everything, make the best choice . . and something less likely ends up happening.
Star Trek Discovery
“Yum.”
I agree. Of the remaining communist nations, I believe all have abandoned economic communism. Laos, Vietnam and China have market reforms. Cuba is experimenting with them and North Korea has a massive black market economy.
However mixed economic systems do seem to work. Many Asian nations have mixed economic systems and their growth rates are very high.
But once nations abandoned economic communism, their gdp growth tended to explode and start growing at 5-10% a year. That happened in ex soviet states as well as Asian nations when communism was abandoned. Several eastern European nations went from a per capita income of 1-2k at the fall of communism to a per capita gdp of 20k within fifteen years after being able to practice market reforms.
However part of thst growth could be from a legacy due to communism prioritizing investments in education, health care and infrastructure too. All of which encourage growth.
How about the non-working brand new Berlin airport - great idea to have an international hub that symbolises the coming together of a nation - but in practice not so much, especially in a nation that is often seen as a model of efficiency