Wang Laboratories

Decline and fall

The decline and fall of Wang Laboratories can be seen from a number of viewpoints. A common view within the PC community is that the company failed because it specialized in computers designed specifically for word processing and did not foresee (and was unable to compete against) general personal computers with word processing software in the 1980s. This view is skewed, though, because word processing was not the mainstay of Wang's business by the time PCs began to gain in popularity. Although Wang manufactured PCs, its main business by the 1980s was its VS line of minicomputer systems.

Related Topics:
Word processing - Personal computer - Software

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There were other factors, however. High among them was Dr. Wang's insistence that his son, Fred Wang, succeed him. Fred Wang was an intelligent, able, business-school graduate, "but by almost any definition," wrote Charles C. Kenney, "unsuited for the job in which his father had placed him." His assignment, first as head of R&D, then as president of the company, led to jealousy and to resignations by key R&D and business personnel.

Related Topics:
Fred Wang - R&D

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One turning point occurred when Fred Wang was head of R&D. In October 1983, Wang Laboratories announced over twenty major hardware and software products. The announcement was well received, but very few of the products were close to completion and many of them had not even been started. All were delivered late and some were never delivered at all. In retrospect this was referred to as the "vaporware announcement," and it hurt the credibility of Fred Wang and Wang Laboratories.

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In 1986 Fred Wang, then 36 years old, was installed as president of Wang Laboratories. Things did not go well. The company was soon clearly in decline and, on August 4th, 1989, Dr. Wang had to fire his son.

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Wang Laboratories eventually filed for bankruptcy protection on August 18, 1992. The three Wang towers in Lowell, which originally cost $60 million to build and housed 4,500 workers in over a million square feet (100,000 m²) of office space, were sold for $525,000. Wang itself would have bought the Towers property at the foreclosure sale but no one at Wang had anticipated that the final price would be so low, and so an opportunity to reacquire the Towers was lost.

Related Topics:
Bankruptcy - August 18 - 1992

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The company emerged from bankruptcy a year or two later with $200 million in hand and embarked on a course of acquisition and self-reinvention, eschewing its former role as an innovative designer and manufacturer of computer and related systems. Later in the 1990s with the acquisition of the Olsy division of Olivetti the company changed its name to Wang Global. By then Wang had settled on "network services" as its new chosen business.

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In 1999 Wang Global, by then back up to $3.5 billion in annual revenues, was acquired by Getronics N.V. of The Netherlands, a $1.5 billion network services company active only in certain parts of Europe.

Related Topics:
Getronics N.V. - Netherlands - Europe

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The Wang VS mainframe computer product line, not actively marketed since the 1992 bankruptcy and now but a tiny portion of the Getronics business, survives to this day (Mar 2004) at a level somewhere in the vicinity of 500 to 1,500 systems worldwide. The most advanced VS model, capable of supporting over 1,000 users -- the VS18000 Model 950 -- was released in 1999, and smaller models based on the same CPU chip were released in 2000 -- the VS6760 and the VS6780.

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