At first blush the problems afflicting Wang Laboratories Inc look very similar to those that have dogged Control Data Corp for so long, but in key respects, Wang is in an even weaker position, because where CDC had several businesses attractive enough to be sold, the only real asset at Wang is its customer base: technically attractive as they are, Wang’s VS business computers use a proprietary architecture in an era when proprietary architectures are a wasting asset, and the company’s office automation systems are still stuffed with Z80 microprocessors, and while the Z80 was a very good chip in its day, it won’t run MS-DOS applications; as for the company’s hopes to build a new business out of its image processing technology and the ingenious Freestyle handwritten data entry system, the company in its present form does not have the resources needed to build it into a big business; president Fred Wang talks of selling a minority stake to another company – and Xerox Corp still makes some sense – only a full merger holds any real promise, with a company that is stuffed with products that could be pushed to the Wang customer base, but has weak marketing; that profile doesn’t fit any major US computer company, which means that Wang’s best hope is probably to provide an entre’e to the world market for a major Japanese – or conceivably European – computer manufacturer, and one of those might well be content with a minority stake in the firm.
