Theranos

There have been plenty of prior examples of companies launched on "vaporware"—a product so far from being actually ready for market that the company had to fake it until they either made it or got caught. (Lotus was an early pioneer of this—a reliable source once told this editor that the first investor demo of Lotus 1-2-3 was actually an elaborate set of screen shots thrown up to show what the spreadsheet would actually do if it was finished.) But that model has very rarely been applied to medicine—which makes Theranos the absolute worst sort of industry groundbreaker.

You'd have to have hidden in an Antarctic neutron detector not to have seen an image of Elizabeth Holmes, the Steve-Jobs-style-cribbing Stanford-dropout founder of Theranos. The subject of gushing business mag profiles and one of Glamour magazine's Women of the Year for 2015, Holmes had the distinction, at 33, of being the world's "youngest self-made woman billionaire." But the fantastic technology that was behind Holmes and Theranos' rapid rise—a blood-testing device (code-named "Edison") that could perform over 200 different medical tests with just a finger-prick—has (so far) turned out to be just as much of a fantasy as the designs for a time machine Holmes claimed to have shown her parents when she was seven.

Theranos was highly secretive about its device and never published data about how it worked. The FDA had found problems with its testing procedures last year. Then in March, as Ars' Beth Mole reported, medical researchers decided to do their own study—sending blood samples from 60 healthy adults to Theranos and to other, more established testing labs. They found some problems with Theranos' results. Theranos responded with a letter that said the researchers were cheating liars.

A month later, federal regulators released a report that found Theranos' finger-prick tests failed to meet quality control checks almost a third of the time. And it turned out that Theranos had stopped using its own equipment for blood tests in June 2015—and ended up voiding all the test results it had issued for 2014 and 2015 done with its "revolutionary" hardware.

Walgreens cut off its blood-test deal with Theranos. Multiple federal investigations began. An investigative report-turned-book-proposal by The Wall Street Journal's John Carreyrou got optioned for a movie (called "Bad Blood"). And in July, the US government's Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) revoked the company's lab certification to do blood tests—and banned Holmes from running a medical lab for two years. (She is still at Theranos as CEO, and the company has insisted that clinical lab work was just "one of Theranos' many opportunities" to profit from its technology.) The company shuttered its clinical labs, laid off about 40 percent of its workforce, and shifted to building a robotic “minilab.”

Finally, in October, Theranos' investors threw up their hands and sued, claiming fraud. Walgreens has also sued. The SEC is investigating possible securities fraud by the company, which has seen its valuation drop from $9 billion to $800 million. Lives have been ruined.

With that much blood spilled, it's hard to imagine Theranos crawling out of the pit that Holmes and her leadership team have apparently dug for it.

—Sean Gallagher

HTC

A perpetual candidate for Deathwatch, HTC has been through so many tribulations over the past three years (bribery! fraud! trade secret theft! horrific product launches!) that it's remarkable the company is still here for us to throw shade on. We continue to be impressed.

The company's management seems to have just about as much confidence in its future as we do—the Vive, HTC's virtual reality headset and big bet for the future, was broken off into a wholly owned subsidiary this year. Maybe the idea is when the good ship HTC finally slams into the bottom of the ocean, the HTC Vive division can swim to the surface.

But even that faint hope is probably in vain: the Vive offers no real technological advantage in VR over other offerings, and it only continues to exist because Valve allows it to exist. Valve essentially owns the VR platform, the technology, and the engineers. If Valve picks a different partner, HTC's Vive division is basically dead overnight.

And how's HTC's core mobile phone business doing? Not well. One hint: HTC's flagship smartphone, the HTC 10, was dropped by partner T-Mobile in July after just two months on the market. And most of the tech press didn't even notice the drop until August.

As a result, HTC's monthly revenue unbelievably still manages to plummet year over year almost without fail (other than a brief bright spot in September). Since January, the company's sales are off by a whopping 38 percent from last year, and HTC reported a two billion New Taiwan Dollar (about $63 million US) operating loss before taxes. We even thought its losses would bottom out by now. Nope.

—Ron Amadeo

Gearbox Software

We had some spirited debate over which gaming company deserved to be placed on Deathwatch for 2017. Rovio was a major contender, considering the lack of major Angry Birds action on recent iOS and Android sales charts. (But I can’t help but think they have a big game cooking, and the company is still floating on the high box-office performance of the first Angry Birds movie earlier this year.) Hello Games might seem like a good knee-jerk choice, considering how badly that studio’s No Man’s Sky was received, but, hey, the game keeps selling.

But Gearbox Software—hoo, boy.

This privately held game studio has been part of the 2K Games publishing family since 2009, with the launch of the incredibly successful Borderlands franchise. 2K put a lot of weight behind the launch of Gearbox’s big 2016 game, Battleborn, but the publisher will probably best remember Battleborn as a giant tax write-off. 2K needed a successful shooter after its major 2015 shooter, Turtle Rock’s Evolve, tanked hugely. But Battleborn may have actually done worse than Evolve, especially since it launched in the giant shadow of a similar and far superior team shooting game.

Given the flat-lined response to Battleborn, Gearbox needed a good product to follow it up. Instead, the company pushed out two lackluster remasters. The first, a 20th anniversary edition of Duke Nukem 3D, may not have cracked the 50,000 unit-sales mark since launching in October on consoles and PC (this conservative estimate relies on a SteamSpy estimate of 10,000 sales on PC, so its total sales could be even lower). That will be followed in January with a remaster of the 2011 shooter Bulletstorm—to be sold at a crazy-high price point of $60 with very little in the way of new content.

Unless Gearbox knows something that I don’t about this pricing strategy, I expect anemic Bulletstorm sales to force some tough decisions at Gearbox HQ. These will rattle the company through the rest of 2017, especially if 2K Games decides to cut its losses in terms of its Gearbox publishing arrangement.

— Sam Machkovech

BlackBerry

This time, for sure. We've listed BlackBerry in one form or another on the Deathwatch ever since we started the list. Last year, we narrowed our grimness to a specific aspect of the company—its mobile operating system—as it became clear (despite one Ars editor's faint praise) that BlackBerry OS and associated phones were headed the way of the dodo. Guess what? We were right.

But BlackBerry didn't stop its self-immolation there. After giving Android one real shot with the grossly overpriced and terribly built BlackBerry Priv, BlackBerry has pretty much given up on creating smartphones. Now the company has reduced itself to slapping "BlackBerry" stickers to the back of Chinese smartphones, which it calls the Blackberry DTEK line. In a recent Bloomberg interview, Blackberry's CEO promised one last in-house keyboard phone before turning out the lights on the company's phone manufacturing operations. And we have all the confidence in the world that this device will be well supported with updates!

BlackBerry's euthanization of its phone unit is part of the company's final pivot toward becoming a pure enterprise software company—or, rather, a "sucker CTOs into buying our crappy enterprise software" company. [Editor's note: A BlackBerry spokesperson has objected to Ron's characterization of BlackBerry's enterprise software as "crappy". We have not reviewed the revised BlackBerry mobile device management platform, and Ron's opinion may not be based on current benchmarks.] BlackBerry has recently rebranded and reshuffled its entire mobile device management suite in an effort to remain relevant, even as other players crowd it out of the market. DOD's selection of a Samsung phone for its secure mobile communications device was a signal that even BlackBerry's most dedicated, security-conscious customers are leaving the party.

—Ron Amadeo