The Digital Home

The Sharper Image may have been the favorite of geeks in the '90s, but it's now a shadow of its former self.

After being delisted from Nasdaq, filing for bankruptcy, and announcing that it will close 96 of its 184 stores, the end is near for the specialty electronics retailer.

Or is it?

In an interesting development, The Sharper Image announced on Thursday that its chairman, Jerry W. Levin, is stepping down to pursue the possibility of acquiring the company's stock and assets.

Neither Levin nor The Sharper Image were ready to speculate about what his plans are, but it begs a question: "What is going on at The Sharper Image?" It's a company that has flown under the radar for quite some time, and most have written it off as a relic of the past, but I think there's more to it than that. If nothing else, the soap opera over at The Sharper Image is extremely interesting to watch.

Last week I wrote that Circuit City is in deep trouble and today, BusinessWeek wrote up a news story claiming the retailer may have hired Goldman Sachs to help it find a company that's willing to take this dog and turn it around. And while I'm not sure it will have such good luck doing it, it's about time Circuit City executives wake up and realize that something needs to be done.

In case you haven't been following the Circuit City saga, the company's stock price has lost nearly 75 percent of its value in the past 12 months and although it was hovering at around $19 per share a year ago, it's now languishing at about $4.50 per share.

But what's more important than the financial crisis at the company is its inability to compete on too many levels with Wal-Mart and Best Buy. Most notably, Circuit City is simply unable to compete at the executive level.

Let's be honest -- any company that has lost 75 percent of its stock value, has attempted a resurgence plan that failed miserably and is being pressured by major shareholders to oust its executives is nothing more than a poorly run enterprise. And as any shareholder of the company knows, the best way to solve that problem is to get rid of the anchors and find some new management that may actually know how to run a company.

All this talk about Microsoft and Yahoo is starting to make me sick. Am I the only one who believes that this is all a ploy on the part of Yahoo to stall and hope for something better to come along even though it never will? Microsoft should not even consider upping its bid for Yahoo and although Ballmer and company may know that, it looks like Jerry Yang is still living in a fantasy world.

Why should Microsoft increase the premium on Yahoo's stock price to an even more inflated level? If Ballmer wanted the online firm badly enough, don't you think he would have done that already? And to make matters worse, the current economic condition in both this industry and the macroeconomic environment is not conducive to a bidding war with yourself.

Is Yahoo a valuable entity? Of course. And with its sound business sense and profitable financials, it would make for a nice addition to any company's portfolio. But the real problem is not that Yahoo is making money in this business, it's the fact that it has very few prospects for growth when confronted with the goliath that is Google.

In essence, it's a major player in the online world, but it's not nearly as important to Microsoft as Jerry Yang wants to believe.

For years, people like Jack Thompson have been spewing invective in an attempt to bring the video game industry to its knees. And while he and the rest of his cronies have done all they can to paint the picture that the entire video game industry is rife with sex, drugs and violence, Nintendo has led the way in showing the world that that's not even close to true.

Last week, AJ Pierzynski of the Chicago White Sox was asked why he spent hours during spring training playing with his Nintendo DS. Instead of telling the reporters that he tried to kill 15 men in 10 seconds, he explained that he was playing a vision-training game on the device to improve his ability to see the baseball.

Of course, Pierzynski's use of the DS isn't the only "non-violent" use of video games today and many people have found the DS and Wii to be bastions of fitness, health and fun. And although others are trying to carry the torch with Nintendo, no company in the video game industry has done what the hardware and software manufacturer has been able to do: show the world that there's more to video games than violence and sex.

Just don't tell Jack Thompson that.

Although some people see a reason to buy a device just to read a book, I don't. Some have said that Amazon's Kindle is the savior of the e-book market. I don't believe it. Others say that e-book readers will kill the book publishing industry and bring it into the 21st century. I think that's rubbish. The fact of the matter is e-book readers will never have commercial relevance.

So I know what you're probably thinking -- "But, didn't the AP release a story yesterday that said Amazon's Kindle may have 'revolutionized the e-book market'?". Yep. But if you read between the lines a bit, you'll find that an important piece of the pie is missing -- no one is willing to say how strong sales are and so far, the tiny e-book market is still extremely small.

And although the market may be growing at an extremely slow pace as some have claimed, there's no indication that anyone wants these toys. For years, the book has been a vessel of knowledge and entertainment for people and I simply don't see how a small piece of plastic can change the connection people have to holding a book, flipping the pages and marking notes on the paper.

Simply put, the idea of an e-book reader is fundamentally flawed.

Is it just me or was Dell on top of the world a few years ago? Not only was it pummeling just about every other PC manufacturer in the industry, its online business was buzzing and its business integration was better than ever. And then it all came crashing down.

Last year, Dell announced that it was cutting 8,800 jobs from its payroll and Thursday the company said that it has already laid off 5,550 employees in an attempt to cut costs and make the company more financially sound.

"We are not satisfied with the current state of affairs and are on a mission to fix it," Reuters quoted Dell saying. "Every area of the company is being pursued" for cost cuts.

To make matters worse, last week Dell announced that it was closing one of its desktop manufacturing facilities as part of its layoff program and indicated that it wants to reduce expenses by as much as $3 billion per year over the next three years.

And while many would say that Dell is moving in the right direction, I'm not so quick to agree. How can a company that sat atop the entire computing industry for so long become a shadow of its former self in just two years? Is it that Dell has had a string of bad luck or did Hewlett-Packard, Acer and the rest finally find a way to take the company down?

Sadly, it looks like the latter.

In a recent column over at the The Times online, a guest contributor named Giles Whittell wrote one of the most ridiculous articles I have ever read on the subject of video games. And while he may be entitled to his opinion, his belief that video games are the root of all evil and on par with "heroin and teenage parents" is not only sickening, but ludicrous.

In his piece entitled, "Video games: I'll never buy one", Whittell outlines his hatred for video games and his utter lack of knowledge about what the form of entertainment really means to children and society.

"I hate video games, on or offline," he spewed. "I hate the way they suck real people into fake worlds and hold on to them for decades at a time. I hate being made to feel hateful for saying so, and I hate being told to immerse myself in them before passing judgment, because it feels like being told to immerse myself in smack and teenage pregnancy before passing judgment on them."

Whoa. Calm down, Giles. Smack and teenage pregnancy? That's a new one. Not too sure about you, but where I come from, smack usually involves a nose or a syringe. Oh and pregnancy, yeah, that usually involves something a bit more intimate than pressing buttons on a piece of plastic.

But I digress. What is wrong with this character? Obviously this is a man that's both misguided and misinformed about what's really going on in the world of video games.

Even though news sites are touting the eventual release of new HDTV technologies and calling them the saviors we've been waiting for, the simple fact is they're not anywhere close. And to make matters worse, many of these are nothing more than proofs of concept that have no marketability. In other words, don't start trashing your plasmas and LCDs just yet because they'll be around for quite a while.

On Monday, I had the opportunity to interview Bob Perry, Panasonic's senior vice president for its display division, for the next episode of my CNET Digital Home podcast. During the interview, I asked him what the future of the HDTV market looks like and what we should expect.

Much to my chagrin and certainly some of those who will listen to the interview, he said that the chances of a new HDTV technology hitting store shelves anytime soon are slim. According to Perry, we're still at least a decade away from the next real HDTV technology that could actually supplant LCDs and to a lesser extent, plasmas.

Suffice it to say, it's a sad day for those of us who want to see the next big thing.