Crippling Overspecialization / Real Life

Examples of Crippling Overspecialization in real life. Please remember that 'not being the best at everything' is not a "crippling weakness"; examples should be things that dramatically failed in a way that is directly related to their extreme specialization.

Nature & agriculture

• Animals that are very well adapted to their natural environment and/or a very limited/specialized diet can be very successful and even have major advantages over generalists, provided those specialized conditions remain stable. But they are much more sensitive to environmental changes than animals with more generalized needs. This is most noticeable in apex predators, the ones that have few natural predators and are at the top of the food chain. Adaptable, preferably omnivorous animals are much more likely to survive any kind of extinction event or environmental change.
  • Koalas. They are specialized to eat the leaves of the eucalyptus tree, and practically nothing else, which poses a major issue since the leaves are not only low in nutritional value, but also straight-up poisonous. So to cope with its unsavory diet, the koala evolved... a very small and uncomplicated brain, since a bigger brain would require a lot of energy to function, which a koala simply doesn't get in its diet. This has the unfortunate consequence of koalas being very behaviorally inflexible, as their brains are literally incapable of learning new things: if eucalyptus leaves, which koalas feed on by plucking them from branches, are removed from the tree and placed on a flat surface or in a bowl or dish, the koala will not eat them because it no longer recognizes them as food. (This has let to quite a bit of Memetic Mutation involving "Koalas are stupid and terrible animals" rants online.)
  • The sabertooths, whose namesake dagger-like choppers were designed for hunting large megafauna such as mastodons, woolly rhinos, and giant bison. But when the megafauna died out at the end of the ice age due to a combination of climate change and the arrival from Africa of an adaptable, omnivorous animal that proved to be much better at hunting large megafauna than the sabers^note i.e. humans, the sabers were unable to adapt to a diet of smaller game, and so followed their massive prey to extinction.
  • Likewise, California condors — which are just New World vultures, but huge — seem to have evolved to scavenge megafauna carcasses. With the extinction of their main food sources, their range in recent millennia is a fraction of what it was during the Pleistocene. They only survived on the West Coast by feeding on the remains of sea lions, elephant seals, and other sea mammals. Their smaller close relatives like turkey vultures retain much larger ranges and populations.
  • Likely a cause for the extinction of the large native carnivorous marsupials of Australia as well. The last of them, the thylacine, was simply not able to adapt to the coming of the dingo and was rather quickly displaced and outcompeted while the marsupial lion Thylacoleo had a bite that was extremely well-adapted to killing large prey like the diprotodonts and giant kangaroos it shared its habitat with, but was very inefficient for killing smaller animals and quickly went extinct as Australia's herbivorous megafauna vanished.
  • Cheetahs, specializing in ultimate sprinting, have a very light build and not much strength compared to other large African predators. Against lions, hyenas, leopards and hunting dogs, all a cheetah can do is run. When it comes to prey, anything larger than a Thomson's gazelle is off-limits to most cheetahs (some males can become large and robust enough to take down yearling wildebeests). However, it may be subverted, as some cheetahs have learned to bring down larger prey by hunting in groups. Cheetah mothers sometimes have their cubs eaten by baboons, being unable to defend them. While baboons have an impressive build and sharp teeth, this is not something they could get away with against, for instance, a leopard. The other drawback of the speed is win or lose, the burst of speed leaves the cheetah too tired to do anything to the point that other predators can survive off stealing their kills, so the individual cheetah is always living off just enough meat to get by, if even that. Evidence that cheetahs had undergone a genetic bottleneck at the end of the Pleistocene seems to confirm that this overspecialization at one point nearly drove them to extinction, had circumstances not been favorable enough for them to eventually rebound (at the cost of limited genetic diversity). That said, cheetahs do up their chances of being able to eat in peace by doing much of their hunting midday, when most large predators are less active.
  • The giant panda, which evolved in a time when there were massive forests of bamboo and becoming one of the few large animals that could eat the stuff seemed like a good idea... before the bamboo forests started shrinking and breaking up into smaller areas, with the panda's diet effectively holding them prisoner on rapidly sinking islands. Thanks, of course, in part to Chinese bamboo farmers, and the propensity of farmers to kill things that like to eat their crops. It also doesn't help that the panda eats a vegetarian diet with what is essentially a carnivore's digestive tract, which means that it lacks the ability to break plant fiber down as efficiently as a horse or cow and consequently must eat a greater amount to stay functional — giant pandas don't hibernate despite living in cold mountain forests due to being unable to put on the fat reserves needed in order to do so. The panda in many ways represents a cascade failure of the evolutionary process, a series of "good enough" kludges that let it just barely hang on in its environment (though this is countered by the fact that, under good conditions in the wild, they survive and reproduce perfectly well, and have done so for thousands of years). They do, however, have one very important evolutionary adaptation that will pretty much ensure their survival: humans think they're adorable... but this adaptation doesn't apply to each other, considering their issues of either not raising their own cubs or just not seeming interested in breeding at all. They also have another trait that helped them a great deal in the early days of home printing: being black and white, and therefore cheap to print and photocopy, led them to become the logo for the WWF (a large ecological charity).
  • It's speculated that crippling overspecialization is what killed off the Neanderthals. They were strong, intelligent, and could use tools, and their bulky bodies ensured that they could easily withstand the cold European climates they had to face. However, they required a lot of daily calories, and were primarily meat-eaters (their diets probably consisted of about 80% meat; scientific evidence shows that Neanderthals had digestive tracts specifically evolved to digest meat). When the larger animals they hunted went extinct, Neanderthals couldn't adapt quickly enough and thus died off themselves. However, this may not be as true as previously thought, as examination of Neanderthal remains has shown that they actually ate a broad variety of foods based on what was available, including individuals who appear to have had almost entirely vegetarian diets. And DNA sequencing has shown that they frequently interbred with modern humans. Modern Europeans have up to 5% Neanderthal genes in their genome. From a certain perspective, it may be more accurate to say their species merged with Homo Sapiens than actually went extinct.
  • The majority of parasites, thanks to intense competition, are absurdly specialised, most only capable of infesting one or two species. Some even require passing between multiple species in order to complete its life cycle.
  • The prehistoric pterosaur Nyctosaurus was a definite example, making this trope Older Than Dirt. It was so adapted to flight that it even lost those nifty little wing claws that would have assisted with ground locomotion. Since Nyctosaurus would have to land one way or another, the way it might have walked is a subject of debate. The current theory is that Nyctosaurus used its wings like walking sticks, using them to stabilize itself as it shuffled around on its hind legs.
  • It's theorized that this trope contributed to the extinction of the broad-billed parrot of Mauritius. Its surviving mainland relatives feed on hard palm seeds that have passed through the digestive tracts of larger animals, then been scavenged from dung by the parrots. On Mauritius, the chief herbivores that would have pre-digested such seeds were the dodo and the native giant tortoises, both of which were hunted to extinction in the 17th century. Together with deforestation, this doomed the parrots that depended on such animals' leavings for food.
  • Other examples include the giant shark Megalodon, which was specially adapted to hunt giant whales in tropical or temperate waters, and went extinct when they moved into the Arctic, and the giant ratfish Helicoprion, who was so ridiculously over-specialised no one is even sure what it was supposed to eat◊.
  • Subverted with some animals whose diets, while very specialized and technically limited, are targeted at a food source so plentiful and widespread that their extreme specialization is not likely to ever be an issue (at least as far as diet is concerned). These include the various animals whose diets consist entirely or almost entirely of ants and termites (anteaters, pangolins, echidnas), as well as baleen whales.
  • This has also been inverted in some cases, at least according to some interpretations, as while a food source for specialized hunters remains in above-adequate supply, they have a better chance of surviving than a more generalized species. This is one of the theories for why there are no longer bears in sub-Saharan Africa^note in the past, Agriotherium was present, even if it was the only bear in that region, and they died out in the early Gelasian period, for example — they could survive in the area with the available food sources, but they were just crowded out by predators that are better at hunting and herbivores that are better at subsisting off plants.^note It should be noted that this theory isn't accepted by everyone. For example, India has a similar diversity of large mammals to tropical Africa, but unlike Africa it still has native bears.
  • The kākāpō is a parrot endemic to New Zealand. Its only predators, once upon a time, were airborne raptors that hunted almost exclusively by sight— so it evolved to forage on the ground, with camouflaged plumage, staying still when a predator appeared (to better blend in), and eventually lost its ability to fly. This worked very well... until the Māori came to New Zealand in the late 13th century and introduced land-based, keen-smelling predators such as dogs and rats. The kākāpō's "stay on the ground and hide" strategy was absolutely useless against these new threats, and it was almost driven to extinction. It's also slow-breeding, just to make things worse. As of February 2024, exactly 247 kākāpō remain alive.
  • One of the airborne raptors that the kākāpō had to deal with was Haast's eagle, by some measures the largest flying bird to have lived, with the larger females weighing up to 35 lb/16 kg. However, its diet mainly depended on larger flightless birds, specifically the moa... all species of which the Māori hunted to extinction within about a century of their arrival. Needless to say, Haast's eagle quickly followed the moa into extinction.
  • There are many species of wasp that use a certain creature as a host for their larva, but they tend to only use one creature, so if anything happens to the host species, they wouldn't be able to reproduce. For example, the jewel wasp only uses cockroaches as hosts. Cotesia glomerata only use cabbage white butterfly caterpillars as hosts, but Lysibia nana only uses Cotesia glomerata larva as hosts. Tarantula hawk wasps are huge and require tarantulas as hosts because they tend to be the only spiders large enough to feed their larva. Interestingly, the elegant tarantula hawk wasp, or Pepsis menechma, also hunts trapdoor spiders if tarantulas are not available, which makes sense as trapdoor spiders can be similar in size to tarantulas. In South America, tarantula hawk wasps sometimes attack Brazilian wandering spiders, which can also be similar in size to tarantulas, but since the wandering spider is more aggressive and uses different tactics, the wasp can sometimes lose.
  • Caterpillars tend to only feed on one kind of plant, so if anything happens to that plant, they will starve. For example, monarch butterfly caterpillars only feed on milkweed. Large blue butterfly caterpillars are even more specialized. First, each species only feed on a specific plant like wild thyme, star gentian, etc. Then, when they reach a certain size, they will trick Myrmica ants into thinking they are an ant larva so that they will be taken to the nest and cared for and fed, or even eat the real ant larva, until they can pupate and emerge as adult butterflies. Each species of large blue can only do this trick with a specific Myrmica species; any other kind of ant will just kill them. Human development and other factors that threaten the plants and the ants nearly caused the large blue butterfly to go extinct until they were saved by conservation efforts. Also, the wasp Ichneumon eumerus only uses one species of large blue caterpillar, mountain Alcon blue or Phegaris rebeli, as a host for its young, so when those butterflies nearly became extinct, the wasps nearly went with them.
  • The saiga is a species of steppe-dwelling antelope, which is a grazer adapted for the arid, temperate grasslands. However, it's incredibly specialized for only this environment, making it nearly impossible to rear in captivity and highly susceptible to the smallest changes in its habitat. Captured wild adults would repeatedly run into the walls of their pens until they died, simply because they did not understand the concept of a barrier they could not go around. Even those few that workers could keep from ramming themselves to death, would be mass killed by predators that should otherwise be harmless to an animal their size, like crows or foxes, simply because saiga do not understand that they can defend themselves by fighting back; their only defence is to run. Several times, captive saiga choked to death because they did not know how to chew food chunks into smaller pieces, since they feed only on dry grasses and small shrubs in the wild. Higher than average humidity also wreaks havoc on their population, as they are extremely vulnerable to bacterial infections; frequently, significant portions of their species are wiped out by plagues, sometimes more than half of the entire species, causing massive population swings in a matter of months. Only the fact they are Explosive Breeders by antelope standards keeps them alive, although their range has declined to small pockets of Central Asia while they stretched across the entire Northern Hemisphere during the last ice age.
• Monocultural practices whereby only a single crop is grown in a given area can be more profitable and productive than diversified polycultural practices. However, it requires the extensive use of fertilizers to counteract the inevitable depletion of nutrients in soil, and can be easily disrupted by adverse weather conditions, pest invasions, and the spread of disease.
  • Bananas. Before the 1950s, the single largest banana cultivar by far was the Gros Michel, which was favoured since it could survive in temperate climates and was easily shipped without any special care. Because bananas were bred at the time of their original domestication to remove the seeds from their fruit, they can only reproduce parthogenically, meaning that they are extremely slow to develop resistance via natural mutation. This meant that the entire Gros Michel cultivar was vulnerable to, and ultimately nearly wiped out by, a single disease. The modern banana cultivar of choice is the Cavendish, which has precisely the same level of market penetration, and precisely the same potential for global collapse if the same disease mutates (as it already has) and goes global, or if a new pathogen emerges.
  • Similar to the banana situation, the Irish Potato Famine involved the collapse of production of Ireland's staple food crop, the potato, resulting in mass starvation. While the situation is a bit more complicated than a single crop failing making everyone starve to death, as Ireland produced other crops which it exported to the rest of the United Kingdom, it still resulted in big problems due to the means of distribution and how people fed themselves when they had British landowners. Bad blood from the famine eventually resulted in Ireland withdrawing from the UK.
• This trope is part of two different hypotheses explaining colony collapse disorder, i.e. the sudden die-off of honeybee colonies. According to the first hypothesis, centuries of selecting bees for useful traits (producing more honey, pollinating certain plants more efficiently) has reduced genetic diversity within commercial bee populations, leaving them vulnerable to pathogens. In the second one, feeding bees a diet of pollen from just one species of plant (i.e. one of the commercial food crops) leaves them with a less healthy immune system than feeding them pollen from several different plant species.
• This is a big problem with modern plant breeding. The most commonly grown fruit varieties are those specially bred to put out big harvests and be easily shipped across a continent, while still being visually attractive to buyers on the store shelf. The problem is that in practice this means breeding for thick, brightly-colored skins while sacrificing everything else.
  • Probably the most famous example is the Red Delicious apple, whose name was originally justified but which is now notoriously flavorless. Originally red with yellow lines, Red Delicious apples were later bred to become solid red for the sake of appearance. But those yellow lines they bred out are associated with sugar, meaning the apples lost their popular flavor. The apple industry was overly reliant on these bland apples and needed government assistance to survive, after which they switched to growing what are now far more popular varieties such as Fuji, Gala and Honeycrisp apples.
  • Tomatoes today are similarly blander than they used to be. The commonly-sold varieties used to have green patches at the top that, once again, were actually associated with sugar content. Then the tomatoes were bred to be a solid red color, losing much of their sugar content in the process. One particularly notable example is the disaster of the Flavr Savr tomato from the mid 90s. Genetically modified for ease of harvest, transportation, and shelf life, the tomato turned out to have hardly any flavor while being very expensive and, it turned out, not as easy to harvest as hoped. It proved highly unpopular, and only lasted until 1997 before disappearing from stores everywhere.
• In an odd real life subversion, there was a species of tree in Mauritius that was thought to be germinated by the dodo bird. People believed that, since the dodo went extinct, the tree itself had started to decline. It turned out that this wasn't true; the tree could easily germinate through other birds and did not need the dodo alone to survive.
• The avocado with its large and mildly toxic pit evolved to be dispersed by South American megafauna like now extinct giant ground sloth and the gomphothere by being eaten and then excreted. No extant animal is large enough to do this and if it were not for humans dispersing and domesticating it, the plant would have likely gone extinct.

Weapons & warfare

• The Germans made the ultimate in crippling overspecialization during World War I with the Paris Gun — a mammoth gun that shot shells so high and so far they had to compensate for the fact that the Earth's rotation could put shells off target. While the gun's range was impressive, it burned through barrels so quickly it needed progressively larger shells for each shot, could only shoot around 20 shots a day, and its accuracy was so poor it only stood a chance of hitting a large city (as the name suggests, most of the time that city was Paris).
• During the 1930s, Imperial Japan's Air Force and Navy both demanded that their fighter aircraft be made as light as possible, emphasizing range and maneuverability at the expense of armour. This was complemented by a very rigorous and selective training program that produced exceptional pilots, resulting in Japanese dominance of the skies against less capable Allied pilots and their often-mediocre machines between 1940 and 1942. However, by 1943, Army Ki-43 and Navy A6M ("Zero") fighters found themselves hacked out of the sky by Allied aircraft with increasingly powerful engines, which allowed for superb high-speed performance without sacrificing protection. In the process, the Japanese lost many of their carefully-trained, veteran pilots, which adversely affected the quality of future pilots, who could not learn from the experience of their forebears. This was exacerbated by the fact that veteran Japanese pilots were kept in front-line service until they died or were otherwise unable to fly anymore, meaning that they had little chance to recuperate from the stresses of combat and even less chance to pass on the skills they'd learned to the next generation of pilots. Japanese training doctrine and industrial capability simply could not keep up with the Allies; by the end of the war, they were reduced to expending their novice pilots and obsolescent aircraft in suicidal kamikaze attacks against Allied shipping, and what few experienced pilots and advanced fighters that remained could not effectively challenge Allied air superiority over their home territories.
• Conversely, the Brewster F2A Buffalo was terrible for the exact opposite reason. Built according to misguided naval requirements, the Buffalo was so overloaded with armor and equipment that it was underpowered and often broke its undercarriage when landing. Deployed by some Allied forces in the Pacific Theater during the beginning of the war, it was woefully inadequate compared to the far lighter and more agile Japanese fighters. Pilots nicknamed the plane "the Flying Coffin" not only because it was so badly outmatched, but also because it lacked dedicated protection for the pilot.
  • The Finnish Air Forces were able to use the Brewster to good effect against Russian bombers during World War II, which was in large part due to the fact that they stripped off all unnecessary weight and used tactics which emphasized the Brewster's actual strengths. It also helped the Finnish pilots were generally good, while the Soviets were generally bad and they were generally flying even more mediocre aircraft; the Brewster was phased out in the Finnish Air Force only in 1948. Even then, it still underperformed compared to the Bf 109, with which Finnish pilots made more than twice as many kills during the war, and which remained in service even longer.
• Torpedo boats:
  • This type of vessel proliferated in navies around the world during the late 19th century. The word "torpedo" had once described a static underwater mine^note Which is what Admiral Farragut meant when he said "Damn the torpedoes." during the Battle of Mobile Bay, but when Robert Whitehead perfected a "locomotive" or self-propelled torpedo in 1866, it enabled even a tiny vessel displacing 30 long tons or less to carry a weapon capable (at least in theory) of sinking a 10,000+ ton displacement battleship. Since they were so small and cheap, a country could make swarms of these things to defend the coasts, and torpedo boat tenders or "mother ships" could carry small torpedo boats out to sea for more aggressive purposes. Indeed, it was difficult for unescorted capital ships to defend against torpedo boats because they were small, fast-moving, and hard-to-spot targets. This led to the development of the "torpedo boat destroyer", a small, fast ship designed to hunt and kill torpedo boats. Since they were bigger than torpedo boats, they had much better seaworthiness and range without losing the necessary agility. Furthermore, they evolved into multi-role ships that could either escort larger ships on long voyages for protection against torpedo boats and submarines, or use their own torpedo armament to attack enemy capital ships as part of a fleet action. The torpedo boat was an inferior, one-trick pony in comparison, and as they faded out of use the ships originally designed to hunt them came to be simply called "destroyers".
  • Speaking of submarines and U-boats, those might actually have the best claim to being the spiritual successor of the torpedo boat, since they could also sneak up and kill larger ships with torpedoes. The difference is that their low profile and diving ability gave them better stealth, and they were also big enough to handle long oceanic voyages. When you have submarines for stalking the seas, torpedo boats are at best only useful as an inexpensive extra layer of coastal defense.
• In the same period, the Royal Italian Navy was crippled by two simple government decisions: the Royal Italian Air Force would get complete control on any and all aircraft that weren't recon seaplanes (with no direct link between the fleet and the aircraft squadrons), and warship design would concentrate on speed at the expense of armour or range. This resulted in a fleet with no carriers or air support and ships that were either embarrassingly more fragile than most of their counterparts (destroyers, light cruisers and heavy cruisers) or short-ranged (the Littorio-class battleships, that were fast, well-armoured, better-armed than even the Bismarck, but extremely short-ranged). This strategy was explicitly designed to combat the carrier-less French Navy.^note In fact the Italian ships were designed specifically to take on the French ships, with battleships taking on the enemy heavy cruisers and battleships, heavy cruisers taking on the equally fast but outgunned French light cruisers, light cruisers chasing down and destroying the enemy large destroyers, and destroyers acting as commerce raiders and using their extreme speed for torpedo runs on enemy battleships. Unfortunately, in the Mediterranean Theatre they faced the British Royal Navy, which was more balanced, supported by aircraft carriers, and had a much more aggressive battle doctrine. It soon became a major disaster for the Italians. The Royal Navy handed the Italians many avoidable defeats (the most crushing being the Battle of Cape Matapan, in which torpedo bombers put the battleship Vittorio Veneto out of commission for months and indirectly caused the loss of three heavy cruisers and two destroyers) and, ultimately, the loss of almost all of Italy's merchant fleet and defeat in the North African campaign.
• Japanese and Italian tanks at the start of World War II: expecting their armies' main engagements would be in China and Africa respectively, where their opponents weren't well-equipped (in particular, Ethiopia, Italy's main opponent in the years before the war, had exactly four tanks, all of them being outdated vehicles residuates donated by Italy), they concentrated on light tanks and tankettes that were excellent for taking on such opponents... and when they found themselves dealing with the British and Americans, who fielded large numbers of anti-tank weapons and their own, heavier tanks, they found themselves outmatched and never quite managed to catch up.
• With the invention of guided missiles in the early years of the Cold War, the US thought guns on aircraft were obsolete, and so when early missiles turned out to be incredibly finicky and difficult to use, they lost many jet fighters in the Vietnam War. The F-4 Phantom was armed with the then state-of-the-art AIM-7 Sparrow missiles, which were capable of locking on to a target far outside of visual range. However, the Rules of Engagement mandated that the pilots make visual contact before firing their missiles, since this was before the days of IFF systems that could determine if a target beyond visual range was an enemy. The problem with this was that the missiles would not lock on at that range (not to mention that they required the pilot to keep the radar focused on the target, which is easy when it hasn't seen you yet, but becomes impossible to do when it's dodging and weaving all over the place), and the pilots got slaughtered by the MiG-21 and, more embarrassingly, the obsolete MiG-17. Though the F-4 had an externally mountable "gun pod", it was often bulky and unreliable — and even then it still generally outperformed early missiles. Seeing this mistake, the USAF equipped subsequent jet fighters with integrated gun armament, and all pilots receive training in dogfighting.
• Carriers in a broader sense. While their planes can cause a lot of damage to the enemy, they themselves — save some early designs, that had some serious caliber weaponry for self-defense — are lightly armed, relying on their fighters and escorts to defend them, meaning that if a heavily armed ship catches one with neither available planes nor escort, they're very probably doomed; just ask HMS Glorious.
• In the years leading up to the Bronze Age Collapse, all of the civilizations in West Asia and Northern Africa relied on chariots for their warfare as they allowed them to pick off enemies at a distance while outrunning them. However, manufacturing these chariots and training horses & warriors to use them cost a fortune, making the loss of a single one devastating. When the Sea People attacked, their Zerg Rush tactics completely invalidated chariots; they could outrun maybe ten people, but not a hundred running at them from different directions and cutting off their escape. Their swarms then steamrolled every civilization up to Egypt, who suffered a Pyrrhic Victory as being the last ones standing with nobody to trade with meant no more bronze during the Bronze Age.
• The Roman legions were undoubtedly the best heavy infantry of their time and won Rome countless victories. But their strength came at the expense of the other branches of the military. Roman cavalry were, while highly trained, more of a scouting force and relatively few in number, and what archers and light infantry they had was usually composed of foreign auxiliaries, who had less training and, more importantly, a lot less reason to stand and fight if the going got tough than the Romans did. This specialization directly led to a number of spectacular defeats:
  • At Cannae, it was the crushing defeat of the Roman cavalry by their African opponents that allowed Hannibal to execute his brilliant encirclement maneuver against an army that still heavily outnumbered his own forces.
  • During the Roman invasion of Parthia in 53 BC, Roman cavalry and skirmishers were once again utterly inadequate for defending against the constant harassment by Parthian horse archers. When the bulk of the Parthian army was finally engaged at Carrhae, the Romans were already at the breaking point due to lack of supplies and attrition, and the highly mobile Parthian cavalry force easily exploited gaps in the slow-moving Roman formations.
  • In the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest, the Romans were attacked in terrain that rendered their traditional heavy infantry tactics largely useless. Worse, much of the auxiliary German light infantry that was supposed to screen their extremely vulnerable flanks owed their loyalty more to the Germanic chieftain Arminius than to Rome and either let German raiders slip through the lines or actively joined in the slaughter.
• Those who took advantage of the legions' overspecialization later fell themselves prey to this trope:
  • When the Romans invaded Numidia later in the Second Punic War, the Numidians fought them with an army composed entirely of javelin-throwing light cavalry, while the Romans had their own cavalry plus Balearic slingers for missile troops and were supporting Numidian rebels fighting as light cavalry. The Numidian loyalists were thus not only outclassed in the melee that they could avoid but outclassed at range where they usually enjoyed superiority, and lost swiftly.
    • Later, during the Jugurthine War, the Numidians had expanded their range of troops with light infantry, but would still fall to Roman melee superiority whenever the Romans managed to close in, something they'd try to force with their missile and cavalry auxiliaries. To Jugurtha's credit he was perfectly aware of this and spent much of the war bribing key Roman officers to ruin their cohesion, winning numerous victories until the Romans found generals that could not be bribed and could enforce discipline among their troops.
  • In the first century AD, it was the Parthians' turn, as they only had cavalry and most generals weren't smart enough to bring with them large numbers of spare arrows, while the Romans learned their lesson and started bringing with them adequate numbers of light infantry, armored cavalry and even mounted archers: in about 150 years of conflict, the Parthian victories would be very few, while the Romans overran Ctesiphon (the Parthian capital) three times and were only prevented from utterly annexing the Parthians by being overstretched. Their Sassanid successors would fare much better (while ultimately defeated and weakened to the point the Arabs could overrun their whole empire, they resisted much longer and, right before the campaign that left them crippled, they came extremely close to winning) precisely because they weren't overspecialized, supporting their cavalry with infantry (both barely-trained and lightly-equipped conscripts, good quality heavy infantry and capable archers) and war elephants (useless against the Romans but useful against other enemies).
  • After Teutoburg, the Romans reacted by sending in their best general Germanicus, who commanded multiple legions with Gallic auxilia to cover their flanks, and razed Germanic villages one after the other until Arminius, the chief who had set the Teutoburg alliance up, formed a new coalition and was forced to fight the Romans in an open field at Idistavisus and the Angrivarian Wall, resulting in the destruction of the Germanic coalition to such a point it took two centuries before Germanic tribes could pose a threat to Rome again. In fact after the Angrivarian Wall, the Romans could have conquered the entirety of Germania Magna with ease, had emperor Tiberius not decided to end the campaign on account of the land being too poor for the plunder to repay the expense (plus fearing Germanicus could make a play for the throne).
• The Blackburn TB was designed for one mission, and one mission only: to take out German zeppelins by dropping exploding darts on them. It was a complete failure, as it couldn't fly fast enough to catch zeppelins and couldn't climb high enough to drop its darts even if it could. Nine were built, contributed absolutely nothing to the war effort, and were junked in 1917.
• Interceptor fighters, such as MiG-25 and Lockheed F-104 Starfighter. They were designed with one purpose in mind: to take off and climb to the ceiling altitude as quickly as possible, launch their missile load against the oncoming enemy bombers, and escape. As a result, they tend to be useless for almost anything else; the MiG-25 had engines that were not built to last, while the F-104 was more dangerous to its own pilots than it was to the enemy. Both are also about as agile as a brick. When conventional bombers were obsolete due to ICBMs, these interceptors' main mission disappeared, while later multirole fighters meant that the interceptors themselves were obsolete. The MiG-31 (descended from the MiG-25) is still in service, but is now mainly used as recon aircraft/chase plane/ALBM platform (rather than as interceptor aircraft), while the F-104 has been completely retired from military service.
• This is what doomed the US Navy's Zumwalt-class destroyers to be reduced from a planned order of 32 to 3. The ships were optimized to be bombardment platforms to support amphibious attacks from over the horizon — and out of range of shore-based antiship missiles — as part of an emphasis on building littoral (near shore) capability for a US navy that had otherwise focused on oceanic combat. To this end, they were equipped with the expensive, volume-intensive Advanced Gun System, and adopted their trademark tumblehome hull to maximize radar stealth. Unfortunately, this focus on shore bombardment had consequences in other areas. They carry fewer missile cells than a much smaller Arleigh Burke, and while their radar systems are more advanced they're also not suited towards area air defense. Their Anti Submarine Warfare suite is optimized for littoral tasks and is less capable in blue-water ASW than a Burke. None of this was a huge problem when they were conceived in the 1990s, but during the 2000s advancements in sensors and communications pushed out the range of shore defenses, rendering the shiny AGS and its precision fire support capability obsolete (not that it matters, since procurement of AGS ammunition was cancelled, leaving it with nothing to fire) and leaving the Navy stuck with an expensive, oversized destroyer whose main function had gone away and that was inferior in capability to its predecessor in other destroyer tasks.

Economics & sociology

• The Confederacy during The American Civil War. Their economy was so focused on cash crops like cotton and tobacco that there was exactly one factory capable of producing cannons. There wasn't enough arable land to maintain cotton production for tax revenue and grow the food to support an army. Even with the government building railroads, laying telegraph lines, and confiscating food from private farms for the war effort, the Confederate army was often malnourished and always short on manufactured goods like uniforms and guns. The problems of supply facing the Confederate army were so acute that some historians have suggested that the Battle of Gettysburg was precipitated by a Confederate brigade's attempt to raid a shoe warehouse.
  • Ironically, the Confederacy went into the war thinking that this trope would help them. They believed that they had such a stranglehold on world cotton production that Britain and France would have to intervene on their side in order to keep their textile mills running, and that Northern industry's dependence on Southern cotton would bankrupt their economy and lead them to sue for peace. Pro-secession Southern demagogues in the run-up to the Civil War referred to it as "King Cotton". Unfortunately for them, they found that the Union and their potential European allies were not as cripplingly overspecialized as they had hoped, as the Indian and Egyptian cotton industries were quite able to pick up the slack once Confederate exports were shrunk by Northern attacks. Furthermore, the UK had been stockpiling cotton reserves over the last few years, sensing the growing instability in the US, a move that was assisted by the bumper crops that the South had been producing in the late 1850s. Also, while British needed Southern cotton, it also depended on the North for a quarter of its food supply, so intervention in support of the Confederacy could have easily led to famine. Thus the famous final statement that King Corn was stronger than King Cotton. And for good measure, Britain and France had both recently ended slavery in their home countries and therefore had very little political will to be seen supporting a country whose main goal was maintaining slavery.
• In another sense, the dependence of the American South, the Caribbean, Latin America, Tsarist Russia, and similar agricultural economies on chattel slavery, serfdom, and peonage wound up screwing them in the long run. Bonded labor was unpaid, coerced, captive, and overall far cheaper than wage labor, especially in agriculture, with the only expenses being for food (which, on plantations, the laborers often grew for themselves on small personal plots), clothing, and a shack to sleep in. Wage laborers, meanwhile, demanded paychecks big enough to cover all of their living expenses and those of their families, as well as decent working conditions — and when they didn't get them, they could either quit and find a new job, move to a homestead out west, or unionize (under extremely dire circumstances like mass unemployment, heavy inflation, lack of basic necessities or war, this can swing around, especially in cases of unfreedom with guaranteed securities). In the short term, bonded labor produced a ton of prosperity, albeit chiefly at the top rungs of the socio-economic ladder.
  
  However, the constant fear of rebellion and runaways meant that slaves, serfs, and peons were often kept un- or under-educated (sometimes by law) so as to prevent them from getting any "uppity" ideas, leaving them suited for little beyond working in the fields. Furthermore, bonded labor made agriculture so profitable that the planters saw little need to invest in anything else and diversify their economies, leaving other industries to wither on the vine as the plantations sucked up all of the available capital. As skilled labor grew more important thanks to the Industrial Revolution, the bonded labor economies suffered a devastating shortage of human capital that left them falling far behind the world's industrial regions in overall productivity and prosperity. Even in agriculture, bonded labor allowed inefficient farming techniques to persist by artificially depressing the cost of labor such that it masked the other costs. Farmers that had to pay their field hands, or work their fields themselves with their families, wound up implementing innovative new farming techniques to improve productivity and make up for their lack of cheap labor, and once mechanization came into play (not only drastically reducing labor costs, but also requiring skilled workers to operate the tractors and machines), the advantages became exponential.
  
  In short, while bonded labor was a huge boon to the elites of society in the short term, in the long term it was an enormous drag on the economy and the nation at large that only grew as time went on, to the point where even the elites that had once prospered began to see their place in the world slip behind that of their industrial rivals. Many regions of the world that had depended on bonded labor to support their economies in the past are now beset by all manner of poor social indicators, lagging behind their peers and struggling to overcome the legacy of a vast underclass. The American South only recovered its economic stature due to massive government investment in infrastructure and the Sun Belt boom starting in the post-World War II era (nearly a century after abolition, and even after this recovery of economic stature, several former slave states tend to be less economically prosperous and have lower overall living standards when compared to other states); the Caribbean islands only ceased being a backwater once tourism took over their economies; Latin America became an American fiefdom for generations; and Russia required a vicious revolution to fully undo the damage that serfdom had done to their society (which caused all manner of other problems in the process).
  • Just before The French Revolution, a cleric travelled in a region and noticed two villages: one prosperous and the other very poor. He learnt the former were free while the latter were among the last serfs of France.
• Ancient Sparta had this problem on multiple fronts:
  • Spartan soldiers had a reputation as the most well-trained in Ancient Greece. However, they only trained the heavy-infantry hoplite, and in fact trained so hard that their army was relatively small from all the recruits dying halfway through. They had no cavalry, navy, or light infantry, and their logistics were shockingly inept. The tactics they could execute were severely limited, and their army was too small to maintain extended conflicts. An enemy who refused to fight them head-on could inflict horrendous casualties, such as in the battle of Sphacteria 425 BC; the Athenian light skirmishers simply refused to fight hand-to-hand and harassed them with javelins, running away in the face of danger. At the end of the day, the Spartans were completely demoralized and surrendered, while the Athenians had not suffered any casualties.
  "Sparta is the fellow in the aphorism that “when all you have is a hammer” but placed in a world of screws. The hammer Sparta has, of course, is hoplite battle. Sparta seeks to solve almost all of its issues by applying a hoplite phalanx to the problem, regardless of if the problem can be solved by a hoplite phalanx." - A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry
  • With every adult Spartan male devoted to military training and every adult Spartan female devoted to child-rearing, every other job was done by either slaves or by a (smaller) free but non-citizen class known as perioikoi. This meant that Sparta's economy and infrastructure were maintained by an enormous slave population. Whenever there was a revolt (which was often), the entire city-state ground to a halt, had to perform a brutal purge, and then enslave some hapless nearby village as replacements.
  • Free Spartan citizens scoffed at manual labor so much that a lot of their nobles refused to do even the prettied-up hobbies of other aristocrats, like gardening or textile-work. In the classical era, Spartiates (full male citizens) were prohibited by law from any commercial activity; that was left to the perioikoi.^note Incidentally, the perioikoi were the only Spartan subjects allowed to freely travel outside the Spartan state's borders. Citizens could not travel without permission. They were the most Idle Rich of Ancient Greece's upper class, apart from their taste for blood.
  • Spartiate men began military training at age 7, and were not allowed to marry until reaching full citizenship at 30. Even then, they had to live in barracks until their old age, and had to sneak out to visit their wives and families. This meant that birth rates in the class were low, making it difficult to replace natural attrition from the class. To make matters worse, there was no provision for promotion to the Spartiate class...
  • ...while there were several ways to lose membership in that class (apart from the obvious one of death, whether natural or in battle). Cowardice in battle was the most obvious one, but a bigger problem over time was inability to pay dues to the communal mess halls to which all Spartiates had to belong. Each Spartiate was assigned a plot of land, along with the slaves who worked it; that was intended to be his sole source of income. However, as commercial activity developed, some Spartiates ended up selling the land that was intended to be their means of sustenance, eventually losing the ability to pay mess hall dues. This led to a steady decline in the size of that class, contributing to the loss of their power in the early 4th century BC.
  • On top of everything else, it's questionable whether they were even all that good at the thing they dedicated their entire society to; having a mixed at best record against peer states even in purely Hoplite focused battles.
• In the '50s and '60s, the Detroit automakers took ready advantage of America's seemingly bottomless supply of cheap gasoline and structured their entire business models around the production of cars that, by modern standards, are absolutely titanic. While they also made smaller cars, such vehicles were seen as purely economy cars for those who couldn't yet afford the full-size sedans that got the lion's share of the automakers' interest and R&D investment. Then came the 1973 oil crisis, and gasoline stopped being cheap. Detroit's self-styled reputation for building the biggest, most luxurious automobiles in the world suddenly turned into a liability as Japanese and German automakers that did put serious investment into smaller cars (Japan and West Germany were both much more densely populated than the United States and so compact "city cars" were in much greater demand there, on top of their economies never having been able to take cheap oil for granted) took massive chunks out of the American market, chunks that Detroit has never been able to reclaim even after it started figuring out how to build good compact cars.
• On a larger scale, entire countries can see their economies revolve around a single resource, to the point where they risk economic crisis in the event of a drop in commodity prices. Worse, it's a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy in many cases — economists call it the Dutch disease, after The Netherlands saw its manufacturing sector go into a tailspin in the '60s and '70s following the discovery and exploitation of the Groningen natural gas field. Basically, as revenues from resource extraction increase, the nation's currency gets stronger, making manufacturing exports less competitive due to exchange rates (it becomes more expensive to export, and less expensive to import). The plantation economies described above are an historic example, while today, the Middle Eastern petrostates are the most famous example of this due to their extreme dependence on oil prices to remain economically afloat. For instance, only 18% of Saudi Arabia is actually employed^note Though this has as much to do with Saudi Arabia's strict Wahhabism laws that forbid most women from working (or really doing anything else) than it does with their overreliance on oil, and they import 70% of their food. Their only notable domestic industry is petrochemicals. There's a good reason the United Arab Emirates has heavily invested in the finance sector and tourism over the last 20 years. Large countries with greater pools of commodities are usually insulated by economic diversity and the sheer size of the economies, but for smaller ones, it can be a real problem.
  • The Pacific island nation of Nauru is one of the most egregious cases of the aforementioned "Dutch disease". The country's economy was based entirely on phosphate production, as the island essentially had no other exploitable natural resources, so when the phosphate ran out, so did the cash. Nauru was instantly bankrupted, and figuratively almost overnight went from one of the richest countries on Earth in terms of income per capita to one of the poorest. It didn't help that there wasn't much to actually do with the money, so most of the nation's budget was wasted either on dubious financial schemes, such as financing a musical based on the life of Leonardo da Vinci, or on jet-set living for government officials. The over-dependence of Nauru's economy on phosphate production also completely wrecked the island's ecosystem and destroyed all the farmland, forcing the locals to subsist entirely on canned and processed food, thus leading to extremely high rates of obesity and diabetes and an average life expectancy of only ~55 years.
  • After the conquest of the Americas, the Spanish Empire received more and more silver and gold from their colonies, enabling them to buy items they formerly manufactured and destroying any nascent industry.
• Local, and even national, economies can be devastated if their sole means of income loses value for one reason or another:
  • As previously mentioned, colonial-era Spain was heavily dependent on silver and gold extractions from the Americas. The one time that (half of) the annual treasure shipment was captured by enemies (Battle in the Bay of Matanzas, 1628), the Spanish government went bankrupt.
  • When the American automotive industry discovered it would be cheaper to outsource their manufacturing, Detroit, and other nearby cities in Michigan, faced a steep decline that has left these once vibrant urban communities looking like a third world slum.
  • Michigan has fallen victim to this issue before. In the mid-19th century, copper was discovered in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, leading to the most profitable mineral rush in United States history. This copper was in "native" form (aka nuggets), and could be found in pieces as small as coins or as large as school buses. Copper mining town in the UP were larger and more economically robust than southern Great Lakes towns like Chicago and Toledo, and Michigan's capital was nearly moved to its crown jewel of Calumet. Unfortunately, World War II created a demand for copper that nearly depleted the existing lodes and miners were forced to dig over a mile underground in hot, toxic conditions to follow new lodes. Combine that with the invention of chemical leaching that could be used on poorer ores, and the copper mines of the UP were doomed. In the following decades, the population of the UP was decimated as miners fled South to avoid the economic collapse. The region is now home to abandoned mines, ghost towns, and rampant poverty.
  • When oil prices were high, Hugo Chávez provided government subsidies for everyone on everything in Venezuela, provided they proved their loyalty to him. When oil prices dropped, a domino effect took place, and the country is now gripped by civil unrest due to shortages of food and basic supplies, and their economy is so screwed up that farmers can't afford to farm.
  • The plight of the former industrial heartlands of many European countries is rather similar. They used to be their country's economic engines built on coal and steel, but due to a variety of factors, among them the increasing effort needed to mine more coal out of slowly exhausted mines, they entered a decline. However, The Ruhr area in Germany seems to be on the course of successfully reinventing itself even while other similar regions are still facing problems with no clear sign of an end.

Products & companies

• Tends to happen to railroad vehicles at times.
  • The West German class 103 is a six-axle electric express train locomotive. Introduced in 1970 (four prototypes came in 1965 already), it used to be one of the most powerful single-section locomotives at its time, but it was actually designed to haul first-class intercity and Trans-Europ-Express trains with five to seven cars and needed its power for high acceleration at high speeds of up to 200 km/h. These trains were introduced in 1971, but they ceased to exist only eight years later when the first-class Intercity trains were turned into two-class trains with usually ten to twelve cars, sometimes even a few more, which operated twice as frequently. The 103 wasn't made to endure that, so by the mid to late 1980s, the locomotives were worn out. Using them on slower local trains (while giving some of the heavy Intercity trains to its half as strong predecessors which wore out even quicker) turned out to be a bad idea because constantly running them below 160 km/h led to damages, not to mention that it was uneconomical. Nonetheless, they carried on hauling fast Intercity and InterRegio trains until shortly after the millennium when they were displaced by the class 101 and new ICE high-speed trains.
  • High-comfort and luxury trains in general. Their rolling stock often becomes useless when they're phased out, mostly it's too expensive in service and seats too few paying passengers for cheaper train classes.
    For example the Trans-Europ-Express trains: They started in 1957 with four brand-new purpose-built classes of Diesel trains or DMUs. When more and more TEEs were changed to locomotive-hauled trains in the 1960s, it became increasingly difficult to use the "old" rolling stock. For example, Germany used its trains as national Intercity trains for a while and as touristic trains in the 1980s, but Switzerland and the Netherlands sold their identical trains to Canada. The dome cars that were introduced to the Rheingold in 1962 and the Rheinpfeil in 1963 could barely be used on any other trains, so after the Rheinpfeil ceased to exist in 1979 and the Rheingold was reformed one last time in 1983, the Deutsche Bundesbahn had to sell them to a private operator of touristic trains that eventually sold them to Switzerland. Bar cars in general (these dome cars had a bar, too) were standard in German TEEs but used nowhere else, so when the TEE network began to crumble around 1980, had no more use for them. France had the probably most comfortable TEE cars of all, the Grand Confort cars which made up most of their national TEEs. When these disappeared, they all fell into disuse and were eventually sold to Cuba.
  • Banking locomotives were built to push heavy trains uphill on steep ramps. They were often big, heavy, powerful and rather slow. Eventually, however, the locomotives that pulled the trains became powerful enough so that bankers weren't necessary anymore. Now where else to use them? They were too slow for regular main line services, too heavy for branch lines and too big and cumbersome for switching. Thus, sometimes entire classes of banking locomotives were scrapped when they weren't even old.
  • The three Chesapeake & Ohio M-1 steam turbine locomotives were the largest passenger train steam locomotives ever built. They were meant to haul a new express train from the East Coast to Cincinnati, the Chessie. However, not only were these locomotives so complicated that finding any faults was difficult at best — but the Chessie was simply nixed before its inauguration. Since the Chesapeake & Ohio had no other heavy express train lines, and these monsters weren't good for anything else, the M-1 were scrapped before they were even two years old.
  • While one would think that in the era of open borders and (once more) increasing interest in rail as a mode of transport and travel all throughout Europe, running trains across borders would be easier than ever. Unfortunately, it isn't. And this trope is partially to blame. Back in the day the majority of all trains were locomotive hauled and at least steam locomotives had to be changed at quite regular intervals anyway. So at each border the locomotive was simply switched while customs and border control did their thing and the train would drive on. Nowadays however, the vast majority of all long distance trains are electrical multiple units, which means you can't switch out the locomotive. So the voltage matters and there are only a handful of borders in Europe where the voltage is the same on both sides. Furthermore, there are various systems by which the train "communicates" with the track (in lieu of traditional signals) — those were invented several times in different countries and they are mostly not compatible with one another. The European Union has seen this problem decades ago and tried to introduce some common standards, but on the one hand an existing system is hard to change from and on the other hand during the period of transition trains have to be capable of both the old and the new system. So there are trains that have to be capable to handle three or four different voltages and three or four different safety standards, which is of course possible, but it is not cheap. The whole thing becomes even more dicey when any European rail manufacturer wants to sell trains abroad, especially when they want to sell to the US, which has unique regulations for practically all aspects of railroading.
  • Omnibus locomotives like the Prussian T 0 were a thing in Prussia and Oldenburg in the late 19th century. They were built to offer cheap passenger transportation on branch lines with rather few passengers and almost no inclines. So for economic reasons, they only had one powered axle (2-2-0), a two-cylinder compound engine and just barely enough power for what they were designed to pull, one or two rather lightweight two-axle passenger cars.
    But whenever more passengers had to be transported, and be it at peak hours, they proved incapable of pulling even one measly additional car, so bigger locomotives that were designed for significantly heavier trains and therefore too expensive had to take over. Some locomotives had a built-in baggage compartment which, however, often proved to be too small, but an extra baggage car would overload the tiny locomotives. Also, the baggage compartment defeated the main advantage of tank locomotives: They couldn't run backwards and thus required turntables.
    Eventually, railcars arrived which could offer the same service for even cheaper. They rendered the omnibus locomotives not only obsolete but completely useless because they were unable to do anything else. It's a wonder that one of them has survived to this day.
  • When Ireland and its railroad (Córas Iompair Éireann) suffered from a dearth of coal after WWII, the steam locomotives that made up pretty much their entire powered rolling stock had to use peat as fuel instead. It worked, but very poorly so. Oliver W. Bulleid tried to solve this problem. He designed a locomotive for CIÉ by toning down the "Impractical" in his Awesome, but Impractical and thus failed Leader class: the CC1. The only specimen of this class ever built was also known as the "Turf Burner" because it was specifically designed to run on peat. In other words, it could not run on coal, period. Not much later, CIÉ could run its locomotives on coal again — with the exception of the "Turf Burner" which remained the only Irish locomotive to absolutely require a working peat supply infrastructure.
  • The GER Class A55, or the "Decapod". In 1902, a proto-London Underground line was proposed named the City & North East Suburban Electric Railway. The Great Eastern Railway, fearing that this new service would poach their passengers, wanted to prove that steam could be competitive with electric. The Decapod was designed to do exactly one thing: Accelerate from standstill at a pace that was on-par with electric trains of the day. It succeeded at doing that and had the City & North East proposal abandoned, but the Decapod was too heavy and large, on top of not having enough fuel capacity for any moderate distance, to actually be useful in any sort of regular service. In 1906 it was convered into a slightly more practical freight engine, but it was still scrapped after just seven years in that role. To close this chapter, the Great Eastern's former territory would be the recipient of a fairly substantial electrification programme in the 50's and 60's anyway.
• Some 1960s show rods went this way. The Surfite was designed to carry the driver and a surfboard. No room for a passenger or groceries (or a wetsuit, for that matter); Mini-powered, no explanation as to why a theoretical owner wouldn't just buy a Mini wagon was ever offered.
• Some infomercial products suffer from this, solving single inconveniences very well, but being a waste of money or space compared to a more versatile tool that can do several things. For example, take a product specifically designed for cutting pineapples: yes, it cuts pineapples very well, but that's the only thing it can do. Unless you're the type of person who eats pineapples very frequently, a simple knife is a better investment and will take up less space in your cupboard.
• According to this account of the Troubled Production of Mass Effect: Andromeda, most of the problems that the game suffered from had to do with the fact that Electronic Arts forced BioWare to use their in-house Frostbite game engine, which by all accounts suffered mightily from this. Designed by DICE for use in the Battlefield games, Frostbite is, by all accounts, an excellent engine to make a First-Person Shooter with, and incredibly difficult to work with for anything else (such as an open-world space exploration game). BioWare's main Edmonton team had a hard enough time programming Dragon Age: Inquisition to work with Frostbite, and their inexperienced B-team in Montreal just was not up to the task, spending much of production just figuring out workarounds with Frostbite while finding themselves forced to scale back their ambitious plans for the game.
• The AlphaSmart is seen as this today — thanks to the affordability of tablets and laptops, which provide much more functionality than just being a glorified portable word processor.
• Similarly, the Advantech I.Q. Unlimited. It was advertised as a family computer, with 12 built-in programs such as a word processor, limited BASIC, and trivia game... and was unable to load in any more, outside of edutainment games made for the VTech Socrates console. Hilariously, it was marketed as "the computer your family will never outgrow", when it ended up being the exact opposite.
• As explained in Matt McMuscles' Wha Happun?, this is what did in Midway Games. Like Capcom before them in the 80s and 90s, they had an overreliance in arcade sales to buoy them up. However, Capcom had already established a presence in the console space thanks to videogames like Mega Man, Ducktales and Resident Evil, thus insulating them for the inevitable arcade decline. When the arcade scene fell apart in the West due to advancing console hardware and production values, Midway was just too late to adjust as other companies already had a foot in the console door. When Midway entered the scene by the end of the 90s, they just couldn't adjust and their games suffered from it, leading to their demise.
• In the 1960s when aircraft manufacturers were seeking to get a cut of the profitable civil aviation market, the French company Dassault, maker of the Mirage series of fighter-bombers, came up with the Mercure. While other contemporary aircraft were designed to fly to either medium or long range destinations, the Mercure was designed to be a short-range aircraft. Unfortunately, Dassault did not figure that other medium-range aircraft could be used for short-range travel as well, and their calculations as to what ranges the Mercure could reach were based on Mercures taking off from Paris, and did not account for Mercures taking off from other European cities, or how practical they could be in a large country like the U.S.. Because it was basically useless to an airline outside of France, Dassault only was able to sell just 12, all to just one airline (which not surprisingly, was based in France).
• The TwitterPeek was riddled with numerous flaws, the biggest one also being its main selling point: its sole function is accessing the website Twitter. When anyone can just do the same thing on a smartphone, it made the TwitterPeek redundant.

Sports & martial arts

• Professional bodybuilders have their workouts revolve around having massive, well-defined musculature. However, this causes problems if they try to do anything else. Having large muscles is not the same as having strong muscles. This is why powerlifters and weightlifters, who do have to be strong, don't look like bodybuilders. Large muscles can reduce flexibility required in other activities, the amount of energy necessary to put into workouts means they often don't have the energy to do anything else, and they have to pay attention to details like body fat composition and fluid retention that others athletes don't have to care about because bodybuilding is based on appearance. In short, if you intend to become a top bodybuilder, that's essentially all you can do. However, many bodybuilders do come from the powerlifting ranks (most famously Ronnie Coleman), and nearly all bodybuilders look more like a typical weightlifter during their "offseason", when they are eating big and lifting their heaviest.
• Subverted by boxing. Despite purely focusing on only punching, it's still massively effective in MMA and self-defense, becoming one of the four absolutely essential martial arts in the former (the other three being muay thai, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, and wrestling).
• Some specialized martial arts play this trope straight:
  • Jodo is intended to defeat one single type of weapon (katana) in the hands of an unarmoured opponent who is assumed to fight fair. Against any other opponents jodo is pretty much useless.
  • Sumo is a particularly famous example of a martial art that's really only particularly useful at fighting other sumo wrestlers. The entire art, and indeed, lifestyle, is dedicated to short, intense shoving matches where the two competitors throw everything they have at each other and attempt to out-grapple or simply force their opponent out of the ring. To that end, it focuses heavily on building weight and bursts of speed, without making use of kinjite, or banned moves such as kicks and punches. This results in sumo wrestlers having very little stamina and minimal defenses against opponents willing to use those moves — in particular, all that body fat doesn't protect the head — resulting in many a gimmick match involving a sumo wrestler and another martial artist ending in the former on the ground before the first bell. One of the most notable cases of this was Teila Tuli versus savateur Gerard Gordeau, the first ever televised MMA fight: Gordeau simply kicked Tuli in the head so hard he knocked out three teeth, winning the fight in under thirty seconds.
• Due to the differences between each court surface, professional Tennis players have traditionally been expected to be specialized in one of them. Clay, being a slow and physically demanding surface with a high bounce, favours a type of playstyle that is often difficult to use in both Hard Court and especially the fast and low-bounce Grass, and the same can be said the other way around. Defensive, baseline players in a Clay surface can deliver a Curb-Stomp Battle against a serve-and-volley player who can't apply pressure effectively, whereas on Grass, the serve-and-volley player would return the favour as the baseline player cannot reach the ball in time.
  • As a result, there were players like Pete Sampras who once had the most Grand Slams won by any player, as well as the most at the Grass-surfaced Wimbledon, but had never reached a single Clay-surfaced Roland Garros final, Björn Borg, who once had the joint Open Era record of both Wimbledon and Roland Garros wins but hadn't won a single Hard Court Grand Slam, or the likes of Gustavo Kuerten, who had multiple Grand Slams to his name but all of them were at Roland Garros.
  • This tendency has slowly started to be subverted from the 2000 onwards, however, as true all-around players have emerged, such as Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic, being the only male players in the Open Era to have reached at least 5 Grand Slam finals in all events. Even among them, however, they are considered to be somewhat specialized, with Nadal having such spectacular stats at Roland Garros and in Clay surfaces overall that it overshadows his respectable performances in other surfaces (as well as Federer and Djokovic's own stats at Roland Garros), Federer being best known for his performances in Wimbledon (and to a lesser extent in Hard Court) while his Roland Garros record is not so fondly remembered, and Djokovic being the closest one of the three to being an all-rounder despite his negative records in Roland Garros and the US Open.
  • The sharp differentiation between court surfaces was facilitated mostly by the development of high-quality composite rackets in the 1990s. Before then, all surfaces tended to have longer, more tactical rallies which emphasized technique over power. The essential element to serve-and-volley was a big serve, which was facilitated by improved technology and amplified the tendency of grass court contests to produce aces and bang-bang three shot rallies, and nothing else. In response, tennis tournaments began experimenting with different grass and turf types to "slow down" their respective courts to have bounce and speed properties more similar to that of clay. As a result, serve-and-volley became obsolete in the 21st Century and is largely extinct at the highest level of tennis. To succeed on any surface now, a player must have a more rounded game. Players with physical attributes and play styles well-suited to a powerful service game have largely languished in the middle ranks. It's also thought that this has had a hand in the United States's struggle to produce a Grand Slam men's singles champion since 2003^note The US hasn't been much more successful on the women's side, either—apart from Serena Williams, who won 16 of her 23 singles Slams after 2003. Her sister Venus won two of her seven Slams after 2003, while Sloane Stephens and Sofia Kenin have one each, respectively in 2019 and 2020, though Coco Gauff with her breakthrough in the 2023 U.S. Open may be the next American superstar. In men's doubles, the Bryan brothers were the dominant side from the mid-2000s into the mid-2010s. — European and Latin American players generally are trained on clay, which establishes better fundamentals for the modern game than hard courts or grass.
• With the focus on offense and speed becoming more prevalent and the surge in popularity of the 3-point shot, basketball teams have begun favoring players with a more generalized skillset: players that can contribute both in offense, defense, and have decent shooting skills, range and speed. This, in turn, has caused the decline of the "traditional" big man: players whose main attributes are their imposing size and strength that can dominate the paint but lack decent shooting range and speed to keep up with the fast-paced games. This shift is more prevalent in the professional level, where players that used to be sought after because of their height and strength are now being relegated to the bench because they have limited use on the court now, and even the tallest players are developing their midrange and 3-point shooting in order to stay relevant.
• In soccer/association football, the advanced playmaker position, sometimes referred to as the #10 for the shirt number it is most commonly associated with, is a midfielder who starts behind the forwards and ahead of the other midfielders in some starting formations - a space colloquially known as "the hole." In years past, the #10 would be able to move around the field freely to pick up the ball, start attacking moves, run into the box, and score and assist goals. These players became the stars of their teams and included names such as Diego Maradona, Zico and Michael Laudrup. However, many coaches observed that the creative freedom came at the price of a team's solidity. Furthermore, putting all of your creative eggs in one basket meant it was easier for teams to mark your main man out of the game, as the Italian defender Claudio Gentile famously demonstrated against Maradona at the 1982 World Cup. The #10 still exists in the modern game, but its importance has waned as other positions, ranging from wingers and strikers to even defenders and goalkeepers, now have more involvement in a team's creative play. Many formations do not even include a space for the #10 and have creative midfielders either play on the wing, where they have more support, or give them space alongside other central midfielders if they can do their defensive duties.

Specific people

• Napoleon was a military officer before being crowned Emperor of the French, and it showed: waging war and conquering new lands for the French empire were the only thing he could do to maintain his popularity to an acceptable level, and it worked for several years until his disastrous campaign in Russia that cost him over half his men for nothing. Everything went downhill from there, with his popularity dropping and more military defeats at the hands of every other European country he had severely alienated during the course of his previous campaigns, until being defeated for good at Waterloo.
• EC Comics star "Ghastly" Graham Ingels is considered one of the best horror comic artists in history... unfortunately he specialized a little too much in horrible grotesque imagery; when horror comics got banned in 1950s America, he was unable to adapt to a more family-friendly style, and his career quietly died.

Other

• Some languages end up like this, particularly ones used among specific subcultures. The moribund language of Tofa, used primarily by a nomadic reindeer-herding people, is an example — if you're a reindeer herder, it lets you communicate what you need to say about reindeer concisely and effectively, but it lacks the wider use of another language in the area, Russian.
• The "overfitting problem" in machine learning is basically this: the learning algorithm creates a very complex hypothesis that fits the learning data set perfectly but fails to generalize on any data outside it. It can be shown with this image◊ where the blue line is the result of an overfit hypothesis.

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