Might be a little odd to praise a product that has seemingly failed in the marketplace but the story of the Contrarotator washing machine from Dyson is to me one of the proofs of the value of the free market system:

James Dyson, the man who turned the humble vacuum cleaner into a
designer must-have, has given up on his revolutionary Contrarotator
washing machine, because the product is making a loss.

The point is that it doesn’t matter how much planning you do, (and I’m sure that Dyson did a lot) how much you research desires and markets, you can’t actually tell what is going to succeed until you try it. Well, that’s a bit broad, I think you could probably tell that cockroach flavoured ice cream will not succeed, but the vaccum cleaner did and the washing machine didn’t. There is no bank of bureaucrats that could have predicted those two things. To find out which would prosper, simply necessary to build some and try to sell them. Yes there are failures, but only by allowing, even encouraging those, do we get the successes. Yay for free markets, once again.