by plugins, allowing the user to collect mail from all of their sources into a single inbox. An optional server can be installed for performance and maintenance needs for those sites that required it. In this case any attempted delivery would be intercepted immediately by the server, thereby avoiding delays if the recipient was not online. The server then delivers the message on behalf of the sender when the recipient connects online. The AOCE project suffered from what is known as second-system effect, where engineers spend considerable time designing a system that does everything. Invariably these projects fail as the demands are not only incredibly difficult to meet, but often fail to meet real user needs. Often the ideas themselves are good, but buried inside unusable implementations. Release By early 1993 the client side of AOCE was nearing completion, which was then referred to as PowerTalk. Apple started a pre-release marketing campaign, telling larger customers and even third party email vendors that AOCE would soon arrive and change the market completely. Their claim was that nothing else would be able to compete with its usability, power, and lack of maintenance overhead – all hallmarks of the Apple way. The system was first widely shown at the Macworld Expo in Boston in mid-1993. At the show the developers found that the choice of naming was unwise, due to confusion between PowerTalk and Apple's new voice recognition system, PlainTalk. AOCE was publicly released in September 1993, part of the System 7 Pro bundle that also includes AppleScript utilities. Deployment When the product finally shipped after years of hype, users were dismayed to find that to install it requires a machine with 2.5 MB of RAM minimum, and needed 4 MB to run well. This is the maximum available RAM in many Mac systems of the era. Removing unneeded components do little to address this, and AOCE and the other Apple technology, QuickDraw GX, typically could not be run together because of a lack of memory. While newer machines were able to run AOCE more comfortably, as an email system intended to be run on diverse networks of non-homogeneous machines the requirements greatly impaired market acceptance. Simply downloading and installing separate stand-alone client applications for each mail system the user actually had would use considerably less disk space, and had no constant memory footprint. While PowerTalk was generally an interesting system, a combination