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In its day ''PowerHouse'' represented a considerable achievement. Compared with languages like ''[[Cobol]]'', [[Pascal programming language|''Pascal'']] and ''[[PL/1]]'', ''PowerHouse'' substantially cut the amount of labour required to produce useful applications on its chosen platforms. It achieved this through the features provided by a central data-dictionary, a compiled file that extended the attributes of data fields available in native DBMS with freqently used programming idioms such as display masks, help and message strings, range and pattern checks, help and information texts. To accomplish this PowerHouse was tightly coupled by design to the underlying database management system that predominated on each of the target platforms. In the case of the ''HP3000'' this was the ''Image'' shallow-network DBMS and the entire language reflected its origins.
However, even at its introduction and throughout its life, ''PowerHouse'' was not without its detractors. Like all [[virtual machine]] languages, PowerHouse had an extraordinary appetite for CPU cycles. On machines that usually ran at speeds considerably less than
Regardless, ''PowerHouse'' was eventually overtaken by events. The radical changes wrought by the PC revolution, which began just at the time ''PowerHouse'' was introduced, eventually brought down the cost of host computers to such an extent that high priced software development tools, and ''PowerHouse'' was very high priced, became a hard sell. Although ''PowerHouse'' is still available and continues to receive occasional minor updates, by 1999 ''Cognos'' had all but ceased further development of ''PowerHouse'' on mid-range computers in favour of newer product lines. Products like ''Business Intelligence'' and ''Axiant'' that run on commodity architectures as well as high-end ''Unix'' servers now form the core of ''Cognos Corporation'''s business.
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