Contrary to all announcements, Apple eventually abandoned all plans for A/UX 4.0, never releasing the product. In 1995, PowerOpen was discontinued and Apple withdrew from the Taligent Inc. partnership in December. In 1996, Apple discontinued its Copland project which had spent two years in the public view, intended to become Mac OS 8 and to host Taligent software. From 1996 to 1997, the company deployed a short-lived platform of Apple Network Server systems based upon PowerPC hardware and a customized IBM AIX operating system. Apple's overall failed operating system strategy left it with the badly aged System 7 and no successor. Following its 1996 acquisition of NeXT, Apple introduced 1999's Mac OS X Server, a descendant of the Unix-based NeXTSTEP operating system.