Success Quote by An Wang

There is a distinctly engineer-founder swagger in An Wang's faith that complexity can be tamed. Coming from a businessman who built Wang Laboratories in the era when computers were literally room-sized symbols of intimidation, the line reads as both a philosophy and a sales pitch: the world is messy, but the right tool, the right interface, the right framing can make it feel tractable. It’s not anti-intellectual; it’s anti-theatrical. Complexity, in Wang’s worldview, is often a kind of institutional costume worn by organizations to justify delay, preserve status, or keep outsiders out.

The subtext is managerial as much as it is technical. Reduce the problem, and you reduce the number of people who get to claim ownership of it. You also create a story that can travel: investors can understand it, employees can execute it, customers can buy it. That’s why the quote works rhetorically: it promises not just a solution but legitimacy. A "simple, comprehensible form" isn’t merely easier; it’s more defensible, more scalable, more likely to survive meetings.

Still, the word "usually" is doing careful work. Wang leaves himself an escape hatch from the hard cases: truly complex systems, unintended consequences, the realities that don’t compress neatly. The line captures a classic mid-century tech optimism, when making computers usable for business felt like turning arcana into productivity. It’s a reminder that simplification is power - and that the person doing the simplifying gets to decide what counts as the problem in the first place.