In about four weeks, Michigan Avenue’s Magnificent Mile will get the long-awaited addition of the Viacom Entertainment Store, the two-level, 30,000-square-foot retail playland that will showcase many of the giant entertainment company’s jewels.
Viacom can only hope the store at 600 N. Michigan Ave., which is scheduled to open May 23, is not a blockbuster.
The debt-laden Viacom, which three years ago swallowed Paramount Communications Inc. and about $10 billion of debt, is having trouble digesting its Blockbuster Entertainment Group, which it had hoped would be the cash engine to pay off the debt. Last week’s exit of Bill Fields, who was lured away from Wal-Mart Stores Inc. last year to manage Blockbuster, sent the already sagging Viacom stock tumbling. The stock has dropped 29 percent since mid-March, and it is trading at half the level it was in July of 1995.
Fields’ departure has raised all sorts of questions about Viacom and its apparently failed strategy to use Blockbuster as a one-stop retailer of videos, music, books and computer games.
But Viacom’s inability to make that strategy work should not materially affect prospects for the retail store, said James Goss, an analyst who follows Viacom for Nesbitt Burns Securities Inc., in Chicago.
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“The uncertainties surrounding Blockbuster don’t necessarily carry over across Viacom,” Goss said. “Look at Nickelodeon, MTV. Showtime is doing better. . . . It’s not a hopeless case by any stretch, but anytime you have a problem, it tends to be magnified.”
Poetic Java: Anybody able to use a personal computer to reach World Wide Web sites can obtain a valuable object lesson about the current excitement over Java programming language at this location: www.prominence.com/java/poetry.
There they will find a Web page made to look like the quirky, popular “ElectroMagnetic Poetry” product by Minneapolis-based Magnetic Poetry Inc., which consists of random words printed on tiny magnetic tiles that can be rearranged on a surface such as a refrigerator door to produce poems.
The Web version, created by Maria Winslow, a co-founder of a Java-oriented programming company called Prominence Dot Com Inc., displays dozens of these tiles on the computer screen and a user moves them about with the mouse just as one does with the real tiles on the fridge.
Merlin Hughes, one of Prominence’s programmers, explained that the diverting Web page was designed to dramatize how Java lets people download actual computer programs called applets onto their home machines just as they download files of text or photos or sound.
Once in a visiting machine’s memory, the Java applet runs just as does a word processor or any other program. Thus Winslow’s applet makes the mouse rearrange the word tiles just as a program loaded into the computer from a floppy disk would.
Companies as diverse as International Business Machines Corp., Sun Microsystems Inc. and Oracle Corp. all are working to write Java versions of home and office productivity software, such as word processing programs. This software could then be downloaded by low-cost computers and do its stuff on each desktop without the need for such expensive products as operating systems and applications from giants like Microsoft Corp.
Wireless is more: Right now only about 17 percent of Americans have a wireless phone, so there’s lots of room for expansion, and Martin Singer, a vice-president at Motorola Inc., thinks he knows just how the next boom in wireless communications will occur.
During a recent panel discussion of telecommunications sponsored by the Mid-America Committee and the IME-Italy Midwest Exchange, Singer said that wireless phone companies will soon be able to offer customers one rate when they use their phones in a mobile fashion, such as in their car or while walking outside, and a lower rate when they use that same phone at home or in their office.
When that happens, wireless phones will challenge traditional wireline phones and eventually, “voice conversations will largely be carried wirelessly,” said Singer. But don’t bet on established wireline networks going dark anytime soon.
“Data transfer will continue to require wires and fiber,” said Singer. “The wireline network isn’t going away.”