Gadgetwise Blog: Tip of the Week: Use the Windows Private Character Editor

Need a special text character, symbol or simplified logo that is not available in any of your computer’s fonts? While third-party tools like FontStruct and BitFont Maker 2 allow you to design and create your own characters, PC users can tap right into the Private Character Editor utility that comes with most recent versions of Windows.

The Private Character Editor program lets you create new type characters or edit existing ones, and you can insert them into documents using the system’s Character Map tool. To find the program on a Windows 7 or Windows 8 computer, just look for it by name in the system’s Search box; Windows 7 users can also find the Private Character Editor by going to the Start menu. Click on All Programs, then Accessories and look in the System Tools folder.

It may take a little time to create your character, but the 7Tutorials site has an illustrated guide to the process. Microsoft has its own page of information on using special characters in documents.

DealBook: PC Sales Data May Bolster Case for Taking Dell Private

Joe Raedle/Getty ImagesDell’s founder, Michael S. Dell, and the investment firm Silver Lake are offering to take the company private in a $24.4 billion deal.

It is becoming harder to believe that a turnaround of Dell will be anything but messy – and shareholders may not want to stick around for that part.

A new report released on Wednesday by the International Data Corporation appears to bolster the company’s argument for going private, noting a steep drop in global personal computer sales in the first quarter this year.

The carnage was clear nearly across the board, with sales in the United States dropping 12.7 percent from the quarter a year earlier. Quarterly shipments reached their lowest level since 2006. Virtually all major computer makers have scrambled to cope with falling unit prices and the rise of tablets and smartphones as attractive alternatives to traditional desktops and laptops.

The bloodshed certainly affected Dell, where global shipments contracted more than 10 percent worldwide and 14 percent in the United States. With its shipment of nine million units, the company claimed 11.8 percent of the overall market, again falling behind Hewlett-Packard and Lenovo.

I.D.C. attributed Dell’s problems to continued competition from an array of rivals and customer uncertainty over the company’s future path.

The report mirrors a trend Dell itself documented in its proxy statement last month. The thick document noted repeated instances of the company failing to meet its own projected financial targets for seven quarters.

Dell’s internal revenue estimates for the 2014 fiscal year fell to as low as $56 billion from $66 billion.

PC sales, according to the proxy, still account for more than half of Dell’s revenue despite a number of takeovers intended to bolster the size of its corporate services arm.

In presentations to the board explaining his rationale for what became a $24.4 billion take-private offer, the company founder, Michael S. Dell, said the necessary fixes would hammer the stock even more.

“Mr. Dell stated his belief that such initiatives, if undertaken as a public company, would be poorly received by the stock market because they would reduce near-term profitability, raise operating expenses and capital expenditures and involve significant risk,” Dell disclosed in its proxy.

Still, shareholders like Southeastern Asset Management have argued that Mr. Dell’s bid is a lowball offer, citing a belief that the worst of the turnaround is over. Southeastern in particular has supported tentative rival bids from the Blackstone Group and Carl C. Icahn that would allow investors to hold onto a piece of the company through what is known as a public stub.

Proponents of that deal structure may be heartened that I.D.C. notes that Dell slowed its overall decline in shipments from previous quarters and achieved some sales growth in Asia, excluding Japan.

I.D.C. itself appears more pessimistic about the overall prospects for the business of selling computers, however.

“Although the reduction in shipments was not a surprise, the magnitude of the contraction is both surprising and worrisome,” David Daoud, I.D.C.’s research director for personal computing, said in a statement. “Vendors will have to revisit their organizational structures and go to market strategies, as well as their supply chain, distribution and product portfolios in the face of shrinking demand and looming consolidation.”

DealBook: Private Equity's Penguins on Parade

BlackstoneThe birds holding court with David Blitzer, third from right, Blackstone’s head of tactical operations, and a few of his associates.

Twitter can’t seem to get enough of Mr. Schwarzman’s penguins.

It began when the Blackstone Group posted on Thursday, without much fanfare, a picture of two little flightless birds wandering around the investment giant’s Midtown Manhattan office. As DealBook learned, the two Magellanic penguins were visiting courtesy of SeaWorld, the aquatic theme park company that Blackstone owns.

The two birds were part of an exhibit that SeaWorld was setting up for The New York Times Travel Show, and with a little bit of downtime, their trainers brought the pair over for a visit to their corporate parent. According to a person with direct knowledge of the matter, the penguins — whose species are known to be shy — waddled about with relative authority.

While the penguins were well-behaved during their visit, the person with knowledge of the matter admitted that the unhousebroken visitors left a couple of unexpected mementos on a carpet and a conference table.

Courtesy of Blackstone, here are a few more shots from the birds’ exploits in the big city.

BlackstonePreening in front of a number of Blackstone employees’ children from the local area.BlackstoneThe Magellanic penguins’ visit happened to coincide with a visit by Senator Marco Rubio, the freshman Republican from Florida. Stephen Schwarzman, Blackstone’s cofounder and chief executive, is a prominent donor to the Republican party.

American Delegation Arrives in North Korea on Controversial Private Trip

In Private Manning Case, Jailers Become the Accused

Private Manning faces a potential life sentence if convicted on charges that he gave WikiLeaks, the antisecrecy organization, hundreds of thousands of confidential military and diplomatic documents. But for now, he has been effectively putting on trial his former jailers at the Quantico, Va., Marine Corps base. His lawyer, David E. Coombs, has grilled one Quantico official after another, demanding to know why his client was kept in isolation and stripped of his clothing at night as part of suicide-prevention measures.

Mr. Coombs, a polite but relentless interrogator who stands a foot taller than his client, has laid bare deep disagreements inside the military: psychiatrists thought the special measures unnecessary, while jail commanders ignored their advice and kept the suicide restrictions in place. In a long day of testimony last week, Private Manning of the Army, vilified as a dangerous traitor by some members of Congress but lauded as a war-crimes whistle-blower on the political left, heartened his sympathizers with an eloquent and even humorous performance on the stand.

“He was engaged, chipper, optimistic,” said Bill Wagner, 74, a retired NASA solar physicist who is a courtroom regular, dressed in the black “Truth” T-shirt favored by Private Manning’s supporters.

Private Manning, who turns 25 on Dec. 17 and looks much younger, was quietly attentive during Friday’s court session, in a dress uniform, crew-cut blond hair and wire-rimmed glasses. If his face were not already familiar from television news, he might have been mistaken for a first-year law student assisting the defense team.

It seemed incongruous that he has essentially acknowledged responsibility for the largest leak of classified material in history. The material included a quarter-million State Department cables whose release may have chilled diplomats’ ability to do their work discreetly but also helped fuel the Arab Spring; video of American helicopter crews shooting people on the ground in Baghdad who they thought were enemy fighters but were actually Reuters journalists; field reports on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; and confidential assessments of the detainees locked up at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

As the military pursues the case against Private Manning, the Justice Department continues to explore the possibility of charging WikiLeaks’ founder, Julian Assange, or other activists with the group, possibly as conspirators in Private Manning’s alleged offense. Federal prosecutors in Alexandria, Va., are still assigned to that investigation, according to law enforcement officials, but it is not clear how active they have been lately in presenting evidence to a grand jury.

The current tone of the legal proceedings against Private Manning is most likely temporary. His lawyer is asking the judge overseeing the case to throw out the charges on the ground that his pretrial treatment was unlawful, but that outcome appears unlikely.

As a fallback, Mr. Coombs is hoping the court will at least give Private Manning extra credit against any ultimate sentence for the time he spent held under harsh conditions at Quantico and earlier in Kuwait, where he was kept in what he described as “an animal cage.” After the uproar about his treatment, including public criticism from the State Department’s top spokesman and the United Nations’ top torture expert, military officials moved Private Manning in April 2011 from Quantico to a new prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., where he has not faced the same restrictions on clothing, sleeping conditions and conversation with other inmates.

As if to underscore the gravity of his legal predicament, Private Manning offered last month to plead guilty to lesser charges that could send him to prison for 16 years. Prosecutors have not said whether they are interested in such a deal, which would mean they would have to give up seeking a life sentence for the most serious charges: aiding the enemy and violating the Espionage Act.

Friday’s court session was attended by a dozen Manning loyalists, including Thomas A. Drake, the former National Security Agency official who was accused of leaking documents and pleaded guilty to a minor charge last year. They heard the commander of the Quantico brig, or military jail, explain why she refused Private Manning’s request to be taken off “prevention of injury” status.

Scott Shane reported from Fort Meade, and Charlie Savage from Washington.

A Private Office on the Highway

But when a Fortune 500 chief executive wanted an exercise bicycle installed in his Cadillac Escalade, Mr. Becker, whose company makes vans and cars into luxurious mobile offices, asked himself, “How do I do that? And how do I do that and make it safe?”

He cut a $2,000 recumbent bicycle in half, welded the flywheel with the pedals to the floor and transplanted the heart monitor to a side panel at eye level. Then he shortened one of the car’s seats to clear the path for rotating legs. “The key is that we were able to maintain the three-point seat belt,” said Mr. Becker, who noted that the bike-Escalade required no special inspection from the Department of Motor Vehicles.

Clients also buy custom mobile offices for many other reasons. Occasionally, a medical condition restricts a client’s ability to drive. Some consider tricked-out Mercedes Sprinter vans and Cadillac Escalades — among the most popular models for mobile offices, customizers say — to be understated alternatives to stretch limousines.

Others just like to show off the plush interiors, which can include granite floors, overstuffed leather couches, walnut foldout desks with mother-of-pearl inlay and voice-activated wide-screen televisions. And many chief executives want to speed down the information superhighway even when their car is stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic.

In the last year and a half, advances in mobile broadband Internet have “driven business to us in droves,” said Mr. Becker, whose company, Becker Automotive Design in Oxnard, Calif., charges $150,000 to $500,000 for “ultimate mobile productivity machines.”

Faster broadband enables clients to hold back-seat video conferences or download large files. Three-watt signal boosters and roof-mounted cellular antennas improve cellular reception, reducing Internet dead zones.

“How can people go back to working on little screens on smartphones in the back of cars?” wondered Mr. Becker.

Many of his clients opt for a Slingbox, a relatively inexpensive device ($300) that allows viewers to watch every channel they receive on their home televisions in their offices on wheels. Recently, a man from Saudi Arabia rode through downtown Manhattan in his chauffeured modified Sprinter van but fretted about his inability to watch Arabic-language television.

“You can’t get satellite anything in the canyons of New York,” said Mr. Becker. “We sent a Slingbox to his palace in Riyadh. They hooked it up to his TV feed. Blink. He’s got 24/7 Middle East programming, in Arabic, in his van in New York.”

“Everything I can do in the office, I can do on the road,” said Joe Sachen, the owner of an office Escalade. Mr. Sachen, who lives in Aliso Viejo, Calif., says he now looks forward to his commute to Los Angeles, where he often meets clients of his merchandising company. The roughly 120-mile round-trip can last up to five hours in heavy traffic.

“A lot of people come into my office constantly, and when I’m in the car, it’s just me by myself, and I feel I get so much more done,” he said. He now has a larger computer screen (32 inches) in his Escalade than in his office, he said.

Business has long been conducted in cars. “Traveling salesmen were one of the target markets for the first automobiles,” said Matt Anderson, curator of transportation at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Mich. Ford published a magazine advising salesmen how to convert the Model T to carry product samples.

But the rough roads of the early 20th century were not conducive to writing memos in motion. One of the first cars marketed as a mobile office, the Stout Scarab, cost about $5,000 when it was introduced in 1935 — “a small fortune in the day,” said Mr. Anderson.

DealBook: Private Equity Giants Use Size to Lean on Suppliers

A single company purchased more than 50,000 Hewlett-Packard computers last year, buying in bulk to shave millions of dollars off its costs.

But it was not General Electric, Procter & Gamble or another large, multinational conglomerate with the muscle to dictate prices to suppliers. Rather, the big buyer was the Blackstone Group, a private equity firm.

Private equity firms like Blackstone are emerging as a powerful new force in the marketplace. The big investors, which collectively oversee thousands of companies, are using their size and scope to pressure suppliers, set their own prices and exert their influence in a range of industries, including health care, construction and consumer goods.

Last year, Blackstone was part of a group of companies that collectively bought 16 million reams of copy paper, 35 million FedEx shipments and 900,000 days’ worth of rental cars from National and Avis.

“We have incredible leverage,” said James A. Quella, Blackstone’s North American head of portfolio operations. “The more volume we have, the lower our prices go.”

For years, private equity firms like Blackstone have been viewed as financial alchemists who buy undervalued companies, rejigger their balance sheets and sell them for quick gain. In good times, the strategy worked. Buyout specialists could turn a tidy profit in a matter of months, without getting deeply involved in the businesses they owned.

Hence the “barbarians at the gate” stereotype, which has arisen again in recent months as the presidential election has brought the private equity debate into sharp focus. Critics of the industry have faulted Mitt Romney, the presumed Republican candidate, for his years of running Bain Capital, a large buyout firm.

The industry players have been cast as job destroyers more concerned with making money for investors than improving the companies they own. One particularly critical ad for the Obama campaign featured a company, GST Steel, that went out of business years after it was taken over by Bain Capital.

But with the financial crisis, the decline of stocks markets and the sputtering recovery, private equity has been adapting its ways. While profit remains central and layoffs can still be part of the private equity equation, buyout firms are now stuck holding on to companies longer than expected.

As a result, the firms cannot operate at arm’s length anymore and instead have had to roll up their sleeves and become full-fledged operators.

The private equity titans have huge economic influence and sway, largely because of the size of their portfolios. Blackstone owns all or part of 74 companies that employ 700,000 people and generate $117 billion in annual revenue.

Taken collectively, Blackstone’s businesses would rank as the 13th largest company by revenue, ahead of JPMorgan Chase, I.B.M. and Procter & Gamble.

Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, another megafirm, would be No. 5 on that list with its 74 portfolio companies and $210 billion in aggregate revenue.

The Carlyle Group has investments in 200 portfolio companies, including Dunkin’ Brands and Hertz, that collectively employ around 675,000 people — more than General Motors and General Electric combined.

“Historically, private equity firms were about financial engineering,” said Jason Busch, managing director at Spend Matters, a research firm that focuses on the procurement processes of big corporations. “That’s the fairy tale story from 25 or 30 years ago. Within the last decade, there’s been more operational work to do.”

Blackstone and others are taking the cues from the likes of General Electric. Decades ago, G.E. started buying in bulk for its various businesses units, including aerospace, energy, consumer and finance.

Despite the disparate industries spread across dozens of countries, G.E. decided to make buying decisions at the corporate level, as a way to save money and bolster profits. Today, most large multinational companies adhere to a similar strategy for their supply chain, buying computers, office supplies and all types of products at a discount.

Now, private equity firms are too. Both Blackstone and K.K.R. belong to a group purchasing program called CoreTrust, which has roughly 200 member companies including TPG Capital, Bain Capital, and other private equity firms.

The program, which began in 2006, helps companies save 10 to 50 percent on common items, and even lets them stay enrolled after they are sold or taken public by their private equity owners.

“It’s just common sense,” said Todd Cooper, head of procurement for K.K.R., which uses CoreTrust for some bulk purchases. “Every company, whether I’m a manufacturer or a retailer, uses FedEx. Everybody needs laptops.”

Those savings can add up. Blackstone says it has saved $600 million since 2006 through CoreTrust, direct supplier relationships and an equity health care group, which applies the same group purchasing principles to employee health insurance plans. K.K.R. pegs its total savings at north of $700 million.

“It’s a phenomenal benefit,” said Chris Karkenny, the chief financial officer of Apria, a health care company that was acquired by Blackstone in 2008 and has since used CoreTrust to buy telecommunications equipment, office supplies and other goods. “We do just over $2 billion in revenue, but we’re getting rates that companies with $100 billion in revenue would get.”

In 2005, Mr. Quella of Blackstone recruited Gregory Beutler, a former G.E. executive, to help Blackstone drive down prices in its biggest spending categories. The two set a goal of saving $100 million a year through bulk-buying. They immediately began reaching out to the company’s suppliers, telling them that they were to treat Blackstone’s myriad businesses like one giant conglomerate, and set their prices accordingly.

“We went to U.P.S. and FedEx,” Mr. Quella said. “We said, ‘Guys, we just did an analysis: our smallest company is paying $9.95 for overnight. Our largest company is paying $6.95 for overnight. You guys charge whatever you get away with. We want one price, and we want that price to be the price you give your biggest customer.’ ”

The hardball tactic worked. “We negotiate them to the wall,” Mr. Beutler said of Blackstone’s suppliers.

Another cost-cutting tactic is the reverse e-auction. In the eBay-style process, suppliers are given a set period of time, typically an hour, to bid against one another for a large contract.

Earlier this year, when Emdeon, a medical data provider owned by Blackstone, wanted to renegotiate a contract for a type of large, 112-pound paper rolls it uses to print medical claim statements and customer bills, Mr. Beutler organized a one-hour e-auction involving four paper makers.

Mr. Quella and Mr. Beutler watched eagerly from their desks as the bids began at $47.43 a roll, then fell as companies began lowering their prices. When the auction ended, a late bid of $45.87 a roll had won out. The savings were small by group purchasing standards, only about 3 percent of a contract that averages around $3.5 million annually. But at the scale of private equity, every dollar counts.

“Ten percent of a big number is a big number,” Mr. Quella explained.

While e-auctions and other aggressive negotiating tactics save money for private equity firms, they often put suppliers in a bind: should they lose out on a large contract, or win it and make the narrowest of profit margins?

“It almost is a necessary evil,” said Anthony C. Chukumba, an analyst for BB&T Capital Markets. “You want the business. But if you bid so low and then win a contract, then you have something that is only marginally profitable.”

Some large private equity firms choose not to participate in programs like CoreTrust, typically because they believe the group purchasing process strains relationships with suppliers, and requires them to micromanage companies in exchange for relatively small savings.

Private equity-owned companies, too, have raised objections to group purchasing programs, which often require them to change suppliers from the ones they have used for decades.

“It’s difficult to break companies out of their mindsets,” said Justin Hillenbrand, a partner at Monomoy Capital Partners, a midmarket private equity firm that uses a group purchasing program for its portfolio companies. “Maybe they’ve been using U.P.S. forever, and because of that U.P.S. gives them favors; maybe it delivers things at odd hours. Guess what? If my purchasing program can get FedEx for 25 percent cheaper, they’re going to switch.”

At one meeting, Mr. Quella of Blackstone said, the chief executive of a portfolio company expressed his frustration that the firm’s group purchasing plan would force him to switch the brand of toilet paper his company used in its bathrooms.

Still, group purchasing advocates defend their work as a necessary part of private equity’s fat-trimming process. Blackstone and K.K.R., rival firms in almost every sense, are now teaming up to introduce CoreTrust to Europe.

As group purchasing programs grow, they will have to tread lightly, finding a balance in getting the prices they want and not angering the companies they own, or their suppliers.

“It’s one thing to fool with the balance sheet of a company — it’s another to change its operations,” said Mr. Busch of Spend Matters. “It’s absolutely about rolling up your sleeves, but it’s about having soft hands as well.”