Editing Workplace OS (section)

===Objective===
By 1990, IBM acknowledged the software industry to be in a state of perpetual crisis. This was due to the chaos from the 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, each of them running their own proprietary applications. IBM envisioned "life after maximum entropy" through "operating systems unification at last"<ref name="Life After Maximum Entropy"/> and wanted to lay a new worldview for the future of computing.

IBM sought a new world view of a unified foundation for computing, based upon the efficient reuse of common work. It wanted to break the traditional monolithic software development cycle of producing [[Software testing#Alpha testing|alphas]], then [[Software testing#Beta testing|betas]], then testing, and repeating over the entire operating system — instead, compartmentalizing the development and quality assurance of individual unit objects.<ref name="OWCPE book"/>{{rp|19}} This new theory of unifying existing legacy software and the new way of building all new software, was nicknamed the Grand Unified Theory of Systems or GUTS.<ref name="OWCPE book"/>{{rp|20}}

Coincidentally, Apple already had a two-year-old secret prototype of its [[microkernel]]-based [[object-oriented operating system]] with application frameworks, named [[Taligent#Pink system|Pink]].<ref name="OWCPE book"/>{{rp|20}} The theory of GUTS was expanded by Pink, yielding Workplace OS.