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THE WALL STREET JOURNAL CAMPUS EDITION.
What's News- In Business and Finance
©2001 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Feds, Drug Makers Respond to Bioterror
The government and business community responded to the blotter threat.
For its part, Bayer AG said it is exploring whether to ask some rival drug companies to produce some of its antibiotic Cipro to make certain an adequate supply of the drug is available in case of widespread anthrax attacks. Meanwhile, some drug companies are planning to introduce over-the-counter home anthrax tests. The kits could be in stores across the country as early as Thanksgiving.
Companies Scramble To Test for Anthrax
A growing number of worried U.S. businesses are paying private companies to test their workplaces for anthrax.
Some of these companies have received no threats, and thus are a low priority for law-enforcement officials. In other cases, even though police and fire teams have already performed tests, corporations want to buy additional peace of mind. Anthrax anxiety has kept the phone ringing at several small environmental-services companies, which normally spend their time cleaning up mundane chemical spills.
Malls Introduce New Security Plans
From erecting concrete barricades at entrances to increasing foot patrols, the nation's shopping centers are shoring up defenses against terrorist attacks.
THE WEEK OF OCTOBER 22, 2001
For example, at the 145 malls managed by General Growth Properties—including Virginia's Tysons Galleria shopping center—all delivery vehicles will have their manifests checked to make sure they have legitimate business on the premises. Outside service workers must show identification and require escorts to work sites. Retailers and janitors at the company's malls are receiving training on spotting unusual items. And even more security measures are planned.
EBay Could Gain If Retailers Tumble
As many retailers reel from the slowdown in consumer spending, eBay Inc., remarkably, continues to thrive. Now it appears the company could actually benefit if retailers have a crummy Christmas.
EBay is increasingly being used by traditional retailers, manufacturers and liquidators seeking to reduce inventories and sell refurbished or returned goods, though the bulk of its sales still come from individual sellers and small businesses. If holiday sales are disappointing at the malls, eBay could become an efficient online channel for moving unsold stock. The big question then is whether demand from buyers will remain strong on the site.
Holidays Could Be Bright for E-tailers.
Holiday e-commerce sales are widely expected to grow again this year despite shopper's jittery nerves and the slumping economy. Online sales in the U.S. for November and December are projected to be 20% to 40% higher than last year's holiday
Stockpiling?
Cumulative percentage change in the number of Cipro pills dispensed. Nationwide, the number has risen to 5,568,396 from 3,931,061; in New York, to 491,306 from 162,012.
Source: NDCHealth, Atlanta
...But Airlines Face A Travel Slump
sales, according to a number of forecasts. Some buyers will turn to online shopping as a way to avoid crowded public places like shopping malls, while others may balk at relying on mail and delivery services due to the recent anthrax scare. Others, instead of traveling to see people, may send gifts via the Internet.
In response, many airlines have resorted to offering more cut-rate fares at holiday time than in years past, and some hotels and cruise lines also are offering special deals.
The terror attacks are turning shipping businesses into slipping businesses. Before Sept, 11, the U.S. Postal Service already was facing serious problems; now, the spate of letter-borne anthrax attacks could mushroom into financial disaster for the world's largest mail system.
Shipping Operations See Business Plunge
Travel agents say the holidays aren't looking too jolly for many airlines, hotels, resorts, cruise lines and tour companies. Fears about travel, along with the economic downturn, are prompting more people to plan to drive to Grandma's house this year, or even forgo traditional family gatherings and stay cocooned at home.
Already the attacks have shaken customers' confidence in the Postal Service. Lasting fear will hurt catalog merchants, direct-mail companies and any other businesses that depend on the mail. Some might decide to use fax or e-mail where possible, and steer shipments to competitors.
Complicating matters further; tough new restrictions on parcels shipped in the bellies of airplanes. The Postal Service has been forced to shift a large portion of those items to trucking companies and all-cargo commercial airlines.
Sony Corp., in a move indicative of both the softening economy and the difficulties facing independent entertainment studios, is phasing out a large chunk of its television operations... Dozens of free computer games are popping up on the Web that let people punch, shoot, bomb and torment Osama bin Laden. Goodbye Halloween? Some local and state officials want to put the kibosh on trick-or-treating this year, worried about already-fatigued emergency-response teams. European plane maker Airbus, moving faster than rival Boeing Co., said it has begun offering a standard design for more-hljacker-resistant cockpit doors that can be used on all its current and future jetliners.
Odds & Ends
By Robert J. Toth
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Attack on Trade Center Shows Vulnerability Of Telecom Network
THIS WEEK AT:
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IT Students Make Approach Careers Carefully Career goals are critical in IT, where technology, projects and job descriptions change rapidly. A chief information officer shares advice he wishes he'd had when he was starting out.
runocwn of industries where experts say hiring will be robust.
from THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.
WSJ.com College Journal
Despite Many Layoffs $ _{1} $
- IT Students Must
- Despite many Layouts, Some Industries Are Hiring While the airline, automotive, computer and hospitality management fields have been hit by the slowing economy, some industries are desperate for good applicants. Here's a
Groups Give Students Inside Tracks on Careers
- Groups Give Students Inside Tracks on Careers Students can benefit from joining a campus or local chapter of a professional association. Here's how such groups make it easier to get connected in an industry or company.
NEW YORK—Amid the wreckage of the Sept. 11 attacks was an important target the terrorists probably had no idea they were hitting: one of the world's largest communi- cations hubs
Exposed Wires
In what amounted to the worst damage ever to the nation's communications network, the collapse of the Twin Towers caused steel girders and other debris to rain on the Verizon Communications building on West Street, a few feet from the World Trade Center. The building holds 32 floors of humming gray equipment boxes housing the wires that carry phone and data traffic to nearly 30% of Lower Manhattan and beyond, capacity equal to that of Cincinnati. The destruction also knocked out a dense network of phone wires running beneath the Trade Center.
n't get calls through. AFT&T Wireless Services Inc., which ran many of its switches through West Street, will now spread them throughout the city. Verizon is adding more backup capacity and alternate routes and has asked regulators to raise wholesale rates in New York to cover the expense.
Meanwhile, many businesses that lost phone service on Sept. 11 are taking matters into their own hands. At the New York office of headhunting firm Spencer Stuart, where employees are still working from cell phones, officials are ordering different lines from different carriers that reach their office by different routes and hubs. "It's just something that wasn't worth the cost before the unthinkable happened," says Rick Abel, chief technology officer of the Chicago-based firm.
The industry has learned a few lessons since 1988, when a switching-station fire in Chicago closed O'Hare Airport and wired out phone service for 38,000 local customers for as long as a month. Since then, telecom companies have used technology and better planning to create far more reliable networks, focusing on adding backup circuits to fiber lines that seemed vulnerable to an errant backhoe or natural disaster. Most
The disaster also has sparked a new round of debate about telecom deregulation. Verizon executives have loudly criticized the rules that require them to rent parts of their networks to competitors. Verizon argues that the arrangement has discouraged rivals of the Baby Bells from building alternative networks by making it too cheap and easy to piggyback on the regional giants. But competitors say the catastrophe points to the danger of one company controlling so much, "Verizon is the incumbent, and the wiring has been
Getting calls going again has proved to be the most significant challenge Verizon, the largest local phone company, has ever faced, and it is prompting a rethinking of the security of America's highly concentrated telecommunications systems in an age of terrorism.
By nearly all accounts, New York City's phone network—and the people who run it—performed well under incredible stress. By the Friday after the attack, Verizon had moved the equivalent of 2.1 million voice and data lines around Lower Manhattan. Stringing fiber-optics through open trenches and windows, the company was able to restore the New York Stock Exchange less than a
Much of the Verizon building on West Street is back in service. George Famulare, a 28-year veteran in charge the company's buildings south of Midtown, speaks with evident pride as he looks at the way the facility is being restored. "We have resurrected it," he says.
networks can now respond within milliseconds if a particular link is broken, rerouting traffic through hundreds of alternate links.
week after the assault. Verizon workers wearing respirators had to climb 23 flights of stairs in the dark to lug down servers to run the exchange's price-quotation system.
Strong Performance
Thousands of residents and businesses are still without basic phone service. Verizon has had to rebuild much of the subterranean network connecting southern Manhattan by rerouting lines through other hubs. Where its manholes weren't buried under the remains of the World Trade Center, workers used special industrial vacuum cleaners to suck out debris. The rerouting meant that thousands of data paths had to be redrawn, a task complicated by the fact that many large operations, such as major brokerage firms and the New York Stock Exchange, have custom setups that had to be redone virtually from scratch.
in the ground for forever and a day. They have not built a redundant network," says Tom Jones, director of Spectrotel Inc., a competing carrier based in New Jersey.
'Everything On the Table
All across the country, towns and smaller cities rely on only one hub, meaning that they could lose touch completely if that hub were wiped out. In many larger cities, phone traffic is funneled into very concentrated routes in and out of town. And yet, as of Sept. 11, an industry-led federal committee that addresses phone reliability hadn't discussed terrorism contingency plans in at least a year and a half. "This is now a whole new layer of preparedness that our industry and our country needs to be thinking about," says Ivan Seidenberg, Verizon's president and co-chief executive. "Whether we need antiaircraft missiles on the tops of buildings, I don't think so," he adds. "But I'm willing to put everything on the table."
Already, changes are being made. The federal government has asked the nation's wireless carriers to assign priority to government agencies and emergency personnel in the event of another disaster. On Sept. 11, many rescue workers could-
By Wall Street Journal staff reporters Shawn Young, Dennis K. Berman
Warnings On Software Draw Fire
BY REBECCA BUCKMAN
all it a software dragnet
all in a software druggie.
Millions of businesses over the past 14 months have received warnings that they could be audited for the possible use of unlicensed software. The issuers of the warnings; the Business Software Alliance and Microsoft Corp.
Both parties have been expanding efforts to crack down on companies that might not have proper licenses for software. Licenses serve as proof that a user paid for the software or is otherwise entitled to use it.
But the new campaigns are angering some Microsoft customers, who feel that the efforts are too aggressive—and that they might be aimed at increasing sales for Microsoft at a time its customers are struggling with pared-down technology budgets.
Microsoft says it simply wants to combat piracy. But the enforcement effort comes as the software giant has been delivering new versions of its Windows and Office products and instituting new policies that could boost revenue from them.
A new Microsoft licensing plan, for instance, ends some discounts for organizations that buy software in bulk. And in its new Windows XP product, Microsoft is adding a software "activation" feature that will make it harder to install one copy of the operating system on multiple machines.
Microsoft's antipiracy focus has long matched that of the BSA, a Washington, D.C., trade group, which has power of attorney to conduct investigations on behalf of its nine "global" members, including Microsoft. The BSA estimates the software industry loses nearly $12 billion to piracy every year. And since August 2000, the trade group has been on a campaign to target illegal software use at companies with under 500 employees.
The BSA has sent millions of letters and aired a stream of radio ads offering amnesty to companies that step forward to report illegal software use. A BSA spokesman says companies that receive letters from his group shouldn't feel threatened, even though the BSA can get court orders to conduct surprise inspections, sometimes using federal marshals. The BSA recently toned down the letter in light of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Instead of offering a "software truce," the BSA now bills its program as a "grace period."
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