Well, a college friend worked for a Wang dealer and I worked for a DEC VAR even did some contracts direct with Digital after I became a consultant on my own. DEC had a lot of different forays into the PC world, but they never tried to sell them to consumers. Rainbows were CPM, the PRO and Mates were PDP based, and towards the end they had 386 and 486 computers made by Tandy that we called Dandies.

While many used it as a single user system, Wang was not. It wasn't just word processing that was its selling point, but collaboration. Multiple users could be logged in and editing the same document with changes showing up real-time. That thing that the PC world is oohing and aaahing over today existed then.

Sadly Wang was a one trick pony with its midrange.

Ken Olsen mistakenly never wanted to pursue a home market. They did pursue Wang though. During the VAX days they created All-In-One a menu driven office suite with word processor and document collaboration.

Unlike other computers of the day or even today, DEC VMS could cluster. True clusters, not the hokey stuff you have now. That also had PathWorks for the DOS based PCs that allowed them to have PC formatted storage on the larger VAX system _and_ to access Files-11 based files on the larger computer. I don't remember how, but you could also do All-In-One document collaboration.

It wasn't the PC that killed Wang, it was the fact companies also needed Accounting, Order Processing, Payroll, etc. You could do it all on a VAX. There was even a version of WordPerfect for the VAX.

DEC had its share of boondoggles over time.

Microsoft seems to require close to 8 catastrophic failures before anything so crank up some tunes on your Zune and have Microsoft Bob take you to read Malcolm Berko finest financial advisor to ever live, may he rest in peace, on Microsoft.

https://www.creators.com/read/taking-stock/08/16/america-fir...

Then go look and see Micorosft stock is down roughly 18%.

The Oracle of Omaha doesn't own one share of Microsoft despite owning other tech companies and claiming to be friends with Gates'
https://www.fool.com/investing/2023/03/31/why-isnt-warren-bu...

The culture of creating failures to learn may falsely lead the gullible to believe Agile is actual engineering (it's not) but it exacts and extreme toll.

Eventually leaders believe they can swing for the fences and they bet the farm.

DEC did it with the VAX 9000. Once again they tried to get into the mainframe market with a 32-bit Mainframe knowing full well they had the 64-bit Alpha in the wings. They had the first generation chip and were designing boards for it. The billion with a b dollars they flushed on the 9000 was money they could not afford to lose.

Every Tech Titan chasing LLM (Large Language Model) has pursued their own swing for the fences boondoggle with funds they cannot afford to lose. Professional money has been getting out of Microsoft.

Microsoft could afford to be stupid when the Office suite was a cash cow. Attempting to force subscriptions has forced a stampede to OnlyOffice, Softmaker Office, and other packages, even Google Docs. The safety net is gone. Many PC makers, including Dell and HP have started shipping computers with Linux on them so the OS isn't the cash cow it once was either.

https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-laptops/scr/laptops/app...

Now they are learning the hard lessons that DEC and Wang learned.

Failure isn't progress.