Jumping the S-Curve

7	TOP TEAMS THAT CHANGE AHEAD OF THE CURVE

THE COMPUTER INDUSTRY has certainly seen its fair share of spectacular downfalls, but perhaps none approaches the tragic proportions of Wang Laboratories. Founded in 1951 by the late An Wang, a Chinese American computer engineer and coinventor of a key technology of magnetic-core memory, Wang Laboratories was at the cutting edge of the industry. For more than three decades, it gracefully made the transition from one major product line to another, from calculators to word processors to minicomputers. In its heyday, during the 1980s, the company reached revenues of $3 billion and employed more than forty thousand workers. But then everything quickly unraveled. The PC revolution had begun, and Wang ...