Within the AIM alliance, Apple demonstrated its mature Pink operating system prototype to IBM's GUTS design team which was immediately heavily impressed and influenced.

Workplace OS was at the core of IBM's new unified strategic direction for the entire company, and was intended also as a bellwether toward PowerPC hardware platforms, to compete with the Wintel duopoly.

Many idealistic key assumptions made by IBM architects about software complexity and system performance were never tested until far too late in development, then proven infeasible.

In January 1996, the first and only commercial preview was billed under the OS/2 family with the name "OS/2 Warp Connect (PowerPC Edition)" for limited special order by select IBM customers, as a crippled prototype.

The entire Workplace OS platform was discontinued in March due to very low market demand, including that for enterprise PowerPC hardware.

IBM envisioned "life after maximum entropy" through "operating systems unification at last"[2] and wanted to lay a new worldview for the future of computing.

IBM described its new microkernel architecture as scalable, modular, portable, client/server distributed, and open and fully licensable both in binary and source code forms.

[3]: 18–19 Leveraged upon a single microkernel, IBM wanted to achieve its grand goal of unification by simplifying complex development models into reusable objects and frameworks, and all while retaining complete backward compatibility with legacy and heritage systems.

At the base of Workplace OS is a fork of the Mach 3.0 microkernel (release mk68) originally developed by Carnegie Mellon University and heavily modified by the Open Software Foundation's Research Institute.

[2] Atop the shared services, another layer of userspace servers called personalities provide DOS, Windows, OS/2 (Workplace OS/2), and UNIX (WPIX) environments.

"[3]: 1, 375  Workplace OS/2 was intended to define the future of OS/2, as a 32-bit clean platform and free of internal legacy, with perfect compatibility for source code of OS/2 applications and drivers.

[14] IBM intended for Workplace OS to run on several processor architectures, including PowerPC, ARM, and x86[9][15]: 22  which would range in size from handheld PDAs[16][14] to workstations to large 64-bit servers and supercomputers.

There, GUTS's goals were greatly impacted and expanded by exposure to these similar goals—especially advanced in the areas of aggressive object-orientation, and of software frameworks upon a microkernel.

[3]: 3–4 Through the historic Apple/IBM partnership, Apple's CEO John Sculley said that the already volume-shipping OS/2 and MacOS would become unified upon the common PowerPC hardware platform to "bring a renaissance to the industry".

To gain shared access to key personnel currently working on the existing OS/2, they disguised the project as the Joint Design Task Force and brought "a significant number" of personnel from Boca, Austin (with LANs and performance), Raleigh (with SNA and other transport services), IBM Research (with operating systems and performance), and Rochester (with the 64-bit, object-oriented worldview from AS/400).

[citation needed] At Comdex in late 1992, the team flew in and assembled a private demonstration based on last-minute downloads to replace corrupted files and one hour of sleep.

The presentation was so well received that the prototype was put on the trade show floor on Thursday, as the first public demonstration of the IBM Microkernel-based system running OS/2, DOS, 16-bit Windows, and UNIX applications.

[11] Byte reported that the multiple personality support promised in Workplace OS's conceptual ambitions was more straightforward, foundational, and robust than that of the already-shipping Windows NT.

This left IBM's own PowerPC hardware products without a mainstream operating system, forcing the company to at least consider the rival Windows NT.

[21][17] In April 1994, Byte reported that under lead architect Paul Giangarra,[11] IBM had staffed more than "400 people working to bring [Workplace OS] up on Power Personal hardware".

After seven months of silence on the issue, IBM announced in January 1995 that the intractable endianness problem had resulted in the total abandonment of the flagship plan for an AIX personality.

[23] In mid 1995, IBM officially named its planned initial Workplace OS release "OS/2 Warp Connect (PowerPC Edition)"[3]: 1, 375  with the codename "Falcon".

[12][3]: 2  Packaged as two CDs with no box, its accompanying overview paper booklet calls it the "final edition"[24] but it is still a very incomplete product intended only for developers.

Its installer only supports two computer models, the IBM PC Power Series 830 and 850 which have PowerPC 604 CPUs of 100-120 MHz, 16-196 MB of RAM, and IDE drives.

However, full networking functionality is described within the installed documentation files, and in the related book IBM's Official OS/2 Warp Connect PowerPC Edition: Operating in the New Frontier (1995) — all of which the product's paper booklet warns the user to disregard.

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.

"[18]: 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.

[11] 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.

[15]: 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.

[15]: 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.