different proposed personalities of legacy systems, resulting in the total abandonment of the flagship plan for an AIX personality. In May 1997, one year after its cancellation, one of its architects reflected back on the intractable problems of the project's software design and the limits of available hardware. Academic analysis In September 1997, a case study of the history of the development of Workplace OS was published by the University of California with key details having been verified by IBM personnel. These researchers concluded that IBM had relied throughout the project's history upon multiple false assumptions and overly grandiose ambitions, and had failed to apprehend the inherent difficulty of implementing a kernel with multiple personalities. IBM considered the system mainly as its constituent components and not as a whole, in terms of system performance, system design, and corporate personnel organization. IBM had not properly researched and proven the concept of generalizing all these operating system personalities before starting the project, or at any responsible timeframe during it — especially its own flagship AIX. IBM assumed that all the resultant performance issues would be mitigated by eventual deployment upon PowerPC hardware. The Workplace OS product suffered the second-system effect, including feature creep, with thousands of global contributing engineers across many disparate business units nationwide. The Workplace OS project had spent four years and $2 billion (or 0.6% of IBM's revenue for that period), which the report described as "one of the most significant operating systems software investments of all time" and "one of the largest operating system failures in modern times". See also Taligent, sister project of Workplace OS IBM Future Systems project, a previous grand unifying project Copland, another second system prototype from Apple 64DD, Nintendo's ambitious 1990s platform known for extreme repeated lateness and commercial failure Notes References Further reading OS/2 PowerPC Toolkit, Developer Connection CD-ROMs. The first doc is a description of the OS/2 ABI on PowerPC32. The second is an API addendum, including a description of new 32-bit console APIs. Links at EDM/2 ARM operating systems IBM operating systems Mach (kernel) Microkernel-based operating systems OS/2 PowerPC operating systems X86 operating systems Microkernels