Workplace OS

Workplace OS was born in 1991 as IBM's attempt to move several of its operating system products to a common microkernel to improve portability and reduce maintenance costs. Based on Mach 3.0, the Workplace OS was supposed to run DOS, OS/2, Microsoft Windows, OS/400 and AIX applications, and run on PowerPC, ARM and x86 computers, ranging in size from PDA's to workstations to large servers. The project failed miserably, and was eventually adbandoned in the mid-1990s.

IBM saw Workplace as a way to move their existing customer base onto a PowerPC-based solution. At the time they offered PC's based on the x86/OS/2 and servers on PowerPC/AIX, and everyone in the world was talking about PDA's. By moving to a Mach-based system their operating systems could be easily ported across these systems, targeting the PowerPC Reference Platform (PREP) on the desktop and servers, and ARM on PDAs. Customers could use their existing hardware with the new OS, replacing it with PPC-based machines with little headache.

The inherent difficulty of implementing a kernel with multiple personalities, and poor communication between the teams implementing the different personalities, are largely blamed for the failure and the two billion dollar cost. Throughout the project poor performance was accepted on the belief that the high speed of PowerPC hardware would make performance a non-issue. This turned out to be false in the end. Eventually, the PowerPC kernel with the OS/2 and a new UNIX personality was released as a commercial product in October 1995. In 1996 a second version was released that also supported x86 and ARM processors. Faced with poor performance, low acceptance of the PowerPC Reference Platform that was supposed to run the kernel, poor quality of the PowerPC 620 platform, cost overruns, lack of AIX, Windows or OS/400 kernel personalities, and resulting low customer demand, the project was cancelled.

Upon cancellation, IBM folded both the Workplace OS project and the Power Personal Division responsible for low end PowerPC processors. The other long term repercussion was that IBM decided to stop developing new operating systems, and committed heavily to using Windows, and later Linux.