I once saw someone complaining because they moved into a freshly-built apartment building and things were constantly wrong. A/C not working, shower not working, every time it came down to the contractor doing something wrong.

but the apartment building was finished, the project for building it didn't fail.

In the same way, software projects don't typically fail either, they just have a million things wrong with them.

I don't think I've ever actually seen a software project outright fail, it's more that it never lived up to expectations.