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This paper seeks to identify patterns that bring about failure in major application software implementations. The literature on such failures is reviewed to identify a common set of expected explanations for the failures. A group of forty real world application software implementation projects are then reviewed. Of these, six may be called failures. A brief case study of each failure is presented and explanations for the failure are identified. The explanations for these real world failures are then formally compared to the explanations identified in the literature and similarities and differences are noted. For this data set, there were differences between the expected set of explanations and the actual explanations identified. Most specifically, forms of technological failure were more common than expected from the study of the literature.