With all its hopes now pinned on free-form multi-media systems and image processing, Wang Laboratories Inc is beginning to think better of its plunge three years ago into speech and data switching systems with the acquisition of Allen, Texas-based InteCom Inc, which set it back $156m in 1986. The company has proved a disappointment and was soon being blamed for jaded figures from Wang, although InteCom told Computer Systems News that it was profitable in fiscal 1988. Wang declines to comment on a report that it has retained Merrill Lynch & Co to try to find a buyer for the business, although Wang indicates that while it is disappointed at the slow pace at which it has been able to integrate InteCom products with its own, it is still committed to the integration of speech with its data, text and imaging, which suggests that it will only sell the business if it gets a very good offer. The company’s white hope for regaining the leading position it held in the office with its word processors in the 1970s is its Freestyle system, which enables users to handwrite text and diagrams into a computer, and append both scribbled and spoken notes to them, enabling users to discuss diagrams, memos, reports or whatever remotely on the screen just as if they were sitting side by side – and not only in real time, but also by calling up stored communications that include speech, text and image. The concept was the dream of the ill-fated British government financed Nexos Ltd – but the march of technology has made the concept affordable where in the late 1970s, Nexos was working on machines that would have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
