It’s not that radial menus don’t work, it’s that they’re never essential. To this date, I’ve never seen a user interface done radially that couldn’t be done better in another format.
Mostly, I’ve seen them implemented in obvious wrong ways. There’s no real way to make such a menu work like a right-click in a web page. You could move the cursor to a fixed location for the menu so it has the space it needs, but then you’re moving the user’s cursor. That’s pretty damn disruptive, and many users would lose their grounding with a move like that. But on the flip side, the whole system is about user efficiency, i.e. gestural input, or equal mousing distance to all options, which means you can’t reposition the menu from the edge of the screen and not move the cursor with it. The whole thing just breaks down on both ends.
Data visualizations, sure, but menu/input systems? No.
FWIW, the menu above from Songza is the #1 “notable implementation” on Wikipedia’s entry for this.
