[10] Along with Workplace OS, Copland,[11] and Cairo, Taligent is cited as a death march project of the 1990s, suffering from development hell as a result of feature creep and the second-system effect.

The entire history of Pink and Taligent from 1988 to 1998 is that of a widely admired, anticipated, and theoretically competitive staff and its system, but is also overall defined by development hell, second-system effect, empire building, secrecy, and vaporware.

The Gang gave an ultimatum that they should either be allowed to break from their disliked management and take the entrepreneurial and engineering risks needed to develop the next generation of the Macintosh operating system, or else leave the company.

[12]: 96–97 Erich Ringewald led the Gang of Five as the new Pink group, located one floor below the Apple software headquarters in the De Anza 3 building, to begin a feasibility study with a goal of product launch in two years.

Remembering the small but powerful original Macintosh group, he maintained secrecy and avoided the micromanagement of neighboring senior executives, by immediately relocating his quintet off the main Apple campus.

Having just delivered the System 6 overhaul in the form of MultiFinder, Ringewald was adamant that Pink's intense ambitions were deliverable within a realistic two year timeframe only if the team heavily improved its legacy compatibility code.

In Apple's contentious corporate culture of consensus, this mandate was soon challenged; David Goldsmith resigned from Pink after making a counter-ultimatum for a complete redesign which obviates all legacy problems, and some other staff escalated their complaints to upward management in agreement with that.

Pink's secretive and turf warring culture didn't share source code or product demonstrations, even with the next generation Jaguar workstation design group, until so ordered by CEO John Sculley, and only then under extreme security and monitoring.

Pink's graphical user interface (GUI) is based on a faux 3D motif of isometric icons, beveled edges, non-rectangular windows, and drop shadows.

[15]: 69 [13] The other IBM group sought third party interest in its Grand Unifying Theory of Systems (GUTS) as the solution to the deeply endemic crisis that is software development,[1]: 9  which would soon result in Workplace OS.

"[29] Comparing the eager startup Taligent to its billion dollar investors, a leader at Kaleida said "The culture of IBM and Apple is largely about getting more benefits, perks, larger offices, fancier computers, and more employees".

[12]: 289  Dr. Dobb's Journal would describe the increased abstraction in corporate culture resulting from Hewlett-Packard's upcoming 1994 addition to the partnership: "Now you could be [a former] Apple programmer working for [a former] IBM boss who reported [externally] to HP.

[38] In January 1993, Taligent's VP of Marketing said the strong progress of native TalOS development could encourage its early incremental release prior to the full 1995 schedule for TalAE.

[34][16][1]: 22  The initial plan was to deploy TalAE in early 1994 to help seed the market with a base of applications for TalOS, which was intended to be launched in 1995, with the whole platform going mainstream in two to five years—surely expecting a modern OS from Apple by 1994 or 1995.

[44] Influenced by the results of the survey effort,[citation needed] CEO Joe Guglielmi acknowledged the unavoidable risk of creating its own second-system effect, if the TalAE enhancements could make third party operating systems into competitors of native TalOS.

The first public Taligent technology demonstration was at SFA in Atlanta as an "amazingly fast" and crash-tolerant five-threaded 3D graphics application on native TalOS on a Macintosh IIci.

CEO Joe Guglielmi reported on TalAE gaining the ongoing outside interest of IBM, but suffering relative uninvolvement from Apple—possibly due to Apple's failure to deliver a mainstream OS capable of running it.

[15]: 225 Apple was and will remain the only vendor of a desired target OS which is physically incapable of receiving Taligent's heavy payload due to System 7's critical lack of modern features such as preemptive multitasking.

[citation needed] InfoWorld reported this: "Developers and analysts also said that Taligent's fate is closely tied to that of OS/2 and the other as-yet-undelivered operating systems that it is designed to run on top of."

[31] In May 1995, Taligent canceled the delayed release of its natively hosted TalOS, to focus on its TalAE application framework programming environment that would run on any modern operating system.

[56] Several PEEK beta test sites and final release customers were very pleased with the platform, though disappointed in the marked lack of crossplatform presence on HP/UX, Mac OS, and Windows NT which strictly limited any adoption of CommonPoint even among enthusiasts.

Apple veteran and Taligent cofounding employee, Mike Potel, was promoted from VP of Technology to CTO, saying, "We're better protected inside the IBM world than we would be trying to duke it out as an independent company that has to pay its bills every day.

"[6] The wider mass market debut of CommonPoint technology was in the form of VisualAge C++ 3.5 for Windows, with the bundling of the Compound Document Framework to handle OLE objects.

Apple's own book Mac OS 8 Revealed (1996) had been the definitive final roadmap for Copland, naming the platform's competitors and allies, and yet its 336 pages contain no mention of Pink or Taligent.

[15]: 228–229  The company had failed to deliver even a functional developer preview of Copland in two years; and it discarded the successful A/UX and PowerOpen platforms in 1995, and the new AIX-based Apple Network Server of 1996–1997.

"[75] In 1994, several PEEK beta test sites were impressed with CommonPoint, including one production success story at American Express which replaced its existing six month legacy application in only six weeks.

... Basing apps on CommonPoint results in programs that are more consistent internally, cleaner, and allows the framework to do significant grunt work in cooperation with the Taligent environment.

[76] Due to the second-system effect and corporate immune response, Wired writer Fred Davis compared Taligent's relationship with Apple and IBM to a classic Greek tragedy: "A child is born, destined to kill its father and commit even more unspeakable acts against its mother.

[78] Mark Davis, who had previously cofounded the Unicode Consortium, had at Apple co-written WorldScript, Macintosh Script Manager, and headed the localization of Macintosh to Arabic, Hebrew, and Japanese (KanjiTalk),[38] was Taligent's Director of Core Technologies and architect of all its internationalization technology, and then became IBM's Chief Software Globalization Architect, moved to Google to work on internationalization and Unicode,[6] and now helps to choose the emojis for the world's smartphones.

[79] Ike Nassi had been VP of Development Tools at Apple, launched MkLinux, served on the boards of Taligent and the OpenDoc Foundation, and worked on the Linksys iPhone.