Editing Workplace OS (section)

===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"/>