Wang Laboratories - Going After IBM

Going After IBM

Dr. Wang felt a personal sense of rivalry with IBM, partly as a result of heavy-handed treatment by IBM in 1955-6 over the rights to his magnetic-core patents. (This encounter formed the subject of a long chapter in Wang's own book, Lessons.) According to Charles C. Kenney, "Jack Connors remembers being in Wang's office one day when the Doctor pulled out a chart on which he had plotted Wang's growth and projected that Wang Laboratories would overtake IBM sometime in the middle of the 1990s. 'He had kept it a long time,' says Connors. 'And he believed it.'"

Wang was one of the first computer companies to advertise on television, and the first to run an ad during the Super Bowl. Their first ad literally cast Wang Laboratories as David and IBM as Goliath. A later ad depicted Wang Laboratories as a helicopter gunship taking aim at IBM.

Wang wanted to compete against IBM as a computer company, selling directly to Management Information System departments. Before the VS, however, Wang Laboratories was not taken seriously as a computer company. The calculators, word processing systems and OIS were sold into individual departments, bypassing the corporate data-processing decision-makers. The chapter in Wang's book dealing with them shows that he saw them only as "a beachhead in the Fortune 1000." The Wang VS was Wang's entrée into IT departments. In his book, Dr. Wang notes that, to sell the VS, "we aggressively recruited salesmen with strong backgrounds in data processing ... who had experience dealing with MIS executives, and who knew their way around Fortune 1000 companies." As the VS took hold, the word processor and OIS lines were phased out. The word processing software continued, in the form of a loadable-microcode environment that allowed VS workstations to take on the behavior of traditional Wang WP terminals to operate with the VS and use it as a document server.

Wang made inroads into IBM and DEC markets in the 1980s, but didn't have a serious impact on IBM's mainframe market due to self-limiting factors. Even though Dr. Wang wanted to compete with IBM, too many Wang salespeople were incompletely trained on the significant DP capabilities of the VS. In many instances the VS ran smaller enterprises up to about $500 million/year and in larger organizations found use as a gateway to larger corporate mainframes, handling workstation pass-through and massive print services.

At Exxon Corporation USA, for instance, 13 1985-top-of-the-line VS300s at the Houston headquarters were used in the 1980s and into the 1990s to receive mainframe reports and make them viewable online by executives.

At Mellon Mortgage 18 VS systems from the smallest to the largest were used as the enterprise mortgage origination, servicing, finance, documentation and hedge system and also for mainframe gateway services for logon and printing. Between Mellon Mortgage and parent Mellon Bank, their network contained 45 VS systems and the Bank portion of the network supported about 16,000 Wang Office users for email, report distribution and scheduling.

At Kent and KTec Electronics, two related Houston companies, separate VS clusters were the enterprise systems, handling distribution, manufacturing and accounting, with significant EDI capability for receiving customer forecasts, sending invoices, and sending purchase orders and receiving shipping notifications. Both systems ran the GEISCO EDI package. Kent, which grew to $600 million/year, ran the Arcus distribution software in COBOL and KTec, which grew to $250 million/year, ran the CAELUS MRP system for manufacturing in BASIC.

The high water mark of the VS in the marketplace was probably about 30,000 systems operating worldwide at one time in the mid-to-late 1980s, serving at least several million desktop users.