Editing Workplace OS (section)

==Reception==
===Industrial reception===
Reception was enthusiastically but skeptically mixed, as the young IT industry was already constantly grappling with the [[second-system effect]], and was now presented with Workplace OS and PowerPC hardware as the ultimate second system duo to unify all preceding and future systems. On November 15, 1993, ''InfoWorld''{{'}}s concerns resembled the [[Osborne effect]]: "Now IBM needs to talk about this transition without also telling its customers to stop buying all the products it is already selling. Tough problem. Very little of the new platform that IBM is developing will be ready for mission-critical deployment until 1995 or 1996. So the company has to dance hard for two and maybe three years to keep already disaffected customers on board."<ref name="Infoworld Nov 15, 1993"/>{{rp|5}}

In 1994, an extensive analysis by ''Byte'' reported that the multiple personality concept in Workplace OS's beta design was more straightforward, foundational, and robust than that of the already-shipping Windows NT. It said "IBM is pursuing multiple personalities, while Microsoft appears to be discarding them" and conceded that "it's easier to create a robust plan than a working operating system with robust implementations of multiple personalities".<ref name="Windows NT and Workplace OS"/>

Upon the January 1996 developer final release, ''InfoWorld'' relayed the industry's dismay that the preceding two years of delays had made the platform "too little, too late", "stillborn", and effectively immediately discontinued. An analyst was quoted, "The customer base would not accept OS/2 and the PowerPC at the same time" because by the time IBM would eventually ship a final retail package of OS/2 on PowerPC machines, "the power/price ratio of the PowerPC processor just wasn't good enough to make customers accept all of the other drawbacks" of migrating to a new operating system alone.<ref name="too little, too late">{{cite magazine | magazine=[[InfoWorld]] | date=January 15, 1996 | title=OS/2 for PowerPC release may be too little, too late | pages=35–36 | first=Jason | last=Pontin | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=zj4EAAAAMBAJ&dq=OS/2+for+PowerPC&pg=PA35 | access-date=February 8, 2019}}</ref>

In 2013, ''Ars Technica'' retrospectively characterized the years of hype surrounding Workplace OS as supposedly being "the ultimate operating system, the OS to end all OSes ... It would run on every processor architecture under the sun, but it would mostly showcase the power of POWER. It would be all-singing and all-dancing."<ref name="Half an operating system"/>

===Internal analysis===
In January 1995, four years after the conception and one year before the cancellation of Workplace OS, IBM announced the results of a very late stage analysis of the project's initial assumptions. This concluded that it is impossible to unify the inherent disparity in endianness between different proposed personalities of legacy systems, resulting in the total abandonment of the flagship plan for an AIX personality.<ref name="WorkplaceMicrokernelandOS"/>{{rp|19}}

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.

{{quotation | quote=There is no good way to factor multiple existing systems into a set of functional servers without making them excessively large and complex. In addition, the message-passing nature of the microkernel turns out to be a poor match for the characteristics of modern processors, causing performance problems. Finally, the use of fine-grained objects complicated the design and further reduced the performance of the system. Based on this experience, I believe that more modest, more targeted operating systems consume fewer resources, offer better performance and can provide the desired semantics with fewer compromises.|source=Freeman L. Rawson III, Workplace OS architect, IBM Austin, May 1997<ref name="Experience with the Development">{{cite conference | doi=10.1109/HOTOS.1997.595173 | title=Experience with the Development of a Microkernel-Based, Multiserver Operating System | first=Freeman L. | last=Rawson III | publisher=IBM | location=Austin, TX | url=http://srl.cs.jhu.edu/courses/600.439/ExperienceMicrokernelBasedOS.pdf | conference=IEEE: The Sixth Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems, Cape Cod, MA | date=May 5–6, 1997 | isbn=0-8186-7834-8 | access-date=March 5, 2019}}</ref>
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===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.<ref name="WorkplaceMicrokernelandOS"/>{{rp|22}} 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.<ref name="WorkplaceMicrokernelandOS"/>{{rp|21}} IBM assumed that all the resultant performance issues would be mitigated by eventual deployment upon PowerPC hardware.<ref name="WorkplaceMicrokernelandOS"/>{{rp|22}} The Workplace OS product suffered the [[second-system effect]], including [[feature creep]], with thousands of global contributing engineers across many disparate business units nationwide.<ref name="WorkplaceMicrokernelandOS"/>{{rp|21}} 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".<ref name="WorkplaceMicrokernelandOS"/>{{rp|22}}