Workplace OS is IBM's ultimate operating system prototype of the 1990s. It is the product of an exploratory research program in 1991 which yielded a design called the Grand Unifying Theory of Systems (GUTS), proposing to unify the world's systems as generalized personalities cohabitating concurrently upon a universally sophisticated platform of object-oriented frameworks upon one microkernel. Developed in collaboration with Taligent and its Pink operating system imported from Apple via the AIM alliance, the ambitious Workplace OS was intended to improve software portability and maintenance costs by aggressively recruiting all operating system vendors to convert their products into Workplace OS personalities. In 1995, IBM reported that "Nearly 20 corporations, universities, and research institutes worldwide have licensed the microkernel, laying the foundation for a completely open microkernel standard." At the core of IBM's new unified strategic direction for the entire company, the project was intended also as a bellwether toward PowerPC hardware platforms, to compete with the Wintel duopoly. With protracted development spanning four years and $2 billion (or 0.6% of IBM's revenue for that period), the project suffered development hell characterized by workplace politics, feature creep, and the second-system effect. Many idealistic key assumptions made by IBM architects about software complexity and system performance were never tested until far too late in development, and found to be infeasible. In January 1996, the first and only commercial preview was billed under the OS/2 family with the name "OS/2 Warp Connect (PowerPC Edition)" for limited special order by select IBM customers, as a crippled product. The entire Workplace OS platform was discontinued in March due to very low market demand, including that for enterprise PowerPC hardware. A University of California case study described the Workplace OS project as "one of the most significant operating systems software investments of all time" and "one of the largest operating system failures in modern times". Overview Objective By 1990, IBM acknowledged the software industry to be in a state of perpetual crisis. This was due to the chaos from inordinate complexity of software engineering inherited by its legacy of procedural programming practices since the 1960s. Large software projects were too difficult, fragile, expensive, and time-consuming to create and maintain; they required too many programmers, who were too busy with fixing bugs and adding incremental features to create new applications. Different operating systems were alien to each other, with their own proprietary applications. IBM envisioned "life after