In reality, relatively few users will be able to work in this way all the time. The chances are they will want to use some applications that were written for OS/2 1.3, or for DOS or Windows. These generally work in ways that are not consistent with the purely object-oriented interface described above.
For these users the Workplace Shell provides a very flexible desktop environment from which to launch their non-object-oriented applications. For example, the Program Reference allows the user to represent any program as a Workplace Shell object. This lets it be placed on the desktop or in any convenient folder and started when required. Furthermore, the Workplace Shell provides the ability to associate any program with particular types of data files, so that the user need only open the data file for the associated program to be automatically invoked. This provides an object-oriented technique for starting some programs that were not written with this in mind.