Meanwhile, Apple was facing commercial difficulties of its own. The decade-old Macintosh System Software had reached the limits of its single-user, co-operative multitasking architecture, and its once-innovative user interface was looking increasingly outdated. A massive development effort to replace it, known as Copland, was started in 1994, but was generally perceived outside Apple to be a hopeless case due to political infighting and conflicting goals. By 1996, Copland was nowhere near ready for release, and the project was eventually cancelled. Some elements of Copland were incorporated into Mac OS 8, released on July 26, 1997.