What is the story of the decline of Wang Computer?

Wang Labs was one of a large number of New England-based computer companies that faltered in the late 1980s and 1990s, marking the end of the Massachusetts Miracle. For instance, the struggling Digital Equipment Corporation also downsized in the 1990s and was acquired by Compaq.

A common view within the PC community is that Wang Labs failed because it specialized in computers designed specifically for word processing and did not foresee and could not compete with general-purpose personal computers with word-processing software in the 1980s. Word processing was not actually the mainstay of Wang's business by the time desktop computers began to gain in popularity. Although Wang manufactured desktops, its main business by the 1980s was its VS line of minicomputer and "midframe" systems. The market for these minicomputers was conquered by enhanced microcomputers like the Apple Macintosh and the Wintel PC and Sun, IBM, and Hewlett-Packard servers.

An Wang's insistence that his son, Fred Wang, succeed him contributed to the company's failure. Fred Wang was a 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 research and development, then as president of the company, led to resignations by key R&D and business personnel. Amid declining revenues, John F. Cunningham, an 18-year employee of the firm, resigned as president and COO of Wang Labs to become chairman and chief executive of Computer Consoles Inc. Cunningham resigned due to disagreement with An Wang on how to pull the company out of the slump, as well as being upset that Fred Wang was positioned, nepotistically, as An Wang's successor.

One turning point occurred when Fred Wang was head of R&D. On October 4, 1983, Wang Laboratories announced fourteen major hardware and software products and promised dates of delivery. The announcement was well received, but even at the time, there were warning signs. According to Datamation, Wang announced "everything but the kitchen sink. And if you could attach the kitchen sink to a personal computer, they would announce that too." Very few of the products were close to completion, and many of them had not even been started. All were delivered late, if at all. In retrospect, this was referred to as the "vaporware announcement," and it hurt the credibility of Fred Wang and Wang Laboratories.

In 1986, Fred Wang, then 36 years old, was installed as president of Wang Laboratories. However, the company's fortunes continued to decline. Unlike most computer companies that funded their growth by issuing stock, An Wang had used debt to avoid further dilution of family control of the company. By August 1989, that debt was causing conflicts with its creditors. On August 4, 1989, An Wang fired his son. Richard W. Miller, who had been with the company since 1988, replaced him as the president of Wang Laboratories.

Miller announced in December 1989 that the company would start to embrace established software standards rather than use traditional proprietary designs. An Wang died in March 1990, and Miller took on the additional posts of chairman and CEO. The company underwent massive restructuring and eliminated its bank debt in August 1990, but it still ended the year with a record net loss.

In November 1990, Wang announced their first personal computers running Unix. In 1987, Wang developed a new typesetting system in conjunction with Arlington, MA-based Texet Corp. The system used Xerox printers and UNIX workstations from Sun, but the product vanished before coming to market, because few Wang employees could use or support UNIX. UNIX ran on the VS – Interactive Systems first ported IN/ix (their IBM 360 version of SYS5 UNIX) to run in a VSOS Virtual machine circa 1985, and then Wang engineers completed the port so that it ran "native" on the VS hardware soon thereafter – but performance was always sub-par as UNIX was never a good fit for the batch-mode nature of the VS hardware, and the line-at-a-time processing approach taken by the VS workstations; indeed, the workstation code had to be rewritten to bundle up each keystroke into a frame to be sent back to the host when running UNIX so that "tty" style processing could be implemented. PACE, which offered its data dictionary, excellent referential integrity, and speedy application development, was in the process of being ported to UNIX under the name OPEN Pace. A client-server RDBMS model built on the original product's ideology, OPEN Pace was demonstrated at the North American PACE User Group Conferences in both Boston and Chicago. OPEN Pace, along with a new Windows-based word processor called UpWord (which was at the time considered a strong contender to retake Wang's original market leadership from Microsoft), were touted as their new direction. However, after a marketing study[citation needed] suggested that it would require large capital investments in order to be viable competitors against Microsoft, both products were abandoned.

Ira Magaziner, who was brought in by Miller in 1990, proposed to take Wang out of the manufacture of computers altogether, and to go big into imaging software instead. In March 1991, the company introduced its Office 2000 marketing strategy, focusing on office productivity.

In June 1991, Wang started reselling IBM computers, in exchange for IBM investing in Wang stock. Wang hardware strategy to re-sell IBM RS/6000s also included further pursuit of UNIX software.

In August 1991, Wang won a suit against NEC and Toshiba claiming violation of Wang's patents on single in-line memory modules (SIMMs). The company still recorded a net loss for the 1991 fiscal year.

Wang Laboratories filed for bankruptcy protection on August 18, 1992, at a time when the company's attempted concession from proprietary to open systems was deemed by some analysts as "too little and too late

Founder An Wang forced his experienced son Fred Wang was going to lead the company after his death.