TITLE: Fiber products of manifolds
QUESTION [17 upvotes]: Let $\mathsf{Man}$ be the category of smooth manifolds. Denote by $|~|$ the forgetful functor to $\mathsf{Top}$. If $X \to S$ and $Y \to S$ are morphisms in $\mathsf{Man}$, then $X \times_S Y$ exists and $|X \times_S Y| = |X| \times_{|S|} |Y|$ under suitable assumptions, for example when $X \to S$ and $Y \to S$ are submersions, right? But my actual question is:
Question. What is an explicit example for morphisms $X \to S$ and $Y \to S$ such that $X \times_S Y$ does not exist in $\mathsf{Man}$?
Of course it is not enough (a priori) to prove that $|X| \times_{|S|} |Y|$ is not a manifold. On the other hand, it is easy to see, using morphisms from the point, that the underlying set of $X \times_S Y$ is the fiber product of the underlying sets.
I am also interested in related categories, for example topological manifolds, Banach or Frechet manifolds. Also I would like to add a soft question: The theory of manifolds doesn't really suffer from the failure of the existence of fiber products, right? On the other hand fiber products play an essential role in the theory schemes, which can be seen as "algebraic manifolds". What is a possible reason or explanation for this asymmetry?

REPLY [6 votes]: Regarding failure of existence of fibre products and the comparison with the case of schemes, the basic point is that the intersection of smooth objects need not be smooth.  (The fibre product of $f:X \to S$ and $g: Y \to S$ is the intersection of $\Gamma_f \times Y$ and $X \times \Gamma_g$ in $X \times S \times Y = X \times Y \times S$; here $\Gamma$ denotes graph.) 
In algebraic geometry we "remedy" this by allowing non-smooth varieties/schemes, etc.  But the possible singularities that can arise by intersecting algebraic varieties are much tamer than those that can arise by intersecting submanifolds of some ambient manifold.   So it's not surprising that it's not routine to extend the theory of manifolds to include singular objects.  There are such extensions, such as the theory of stratified spaces, which among other things are related to issues of transversality and so on that arise when considering singularities of intersections.  But the theory of such objects is certainly not a routine extension of the theory of manifolds.  
One reason that people work with O-minimal structures is that these provide a setting which is somewhat close to the topology of manifolds, while being tame enough that one can form pullbacks and fibre products and stay in a world of reasonable objects.