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Technology Stocks : Novell (NOVL) dirt cheap, good buy?
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To: Loring who wrote (26550)4/8/1999 9:33:00 AM
From: Bearded One   of 42771
 
Once again, I'm going to go for the simple explanation. Microsoft is talking about a new Beta for Windows 2000, people are starting to believe that Microsoft will come out with a new OS this year, and are worried about the impact on Novell both from a marketshare and a stock-market standpoint.

We need to nail down as precisely as possible what is going to happen when Windows 2000 actually comes out. Let's assume that Windows 2000 does come out this year. We can also assume that it will be crippleware-- if they are not distributing tools to manage Intellimirror and Active Directory, then those services don't exist in any real sense. So where does that leave us?

Despite my enthusiasm, I've approached all this from a technical standpoint. I'm not an expert at all in the IT world-- I came to Novell from a simple syllogism:
a) Bill Gates said directories are important.
b) 35+ million lines of code can't be done in the time allocated by Microsoft.
c) Novell was separating NDS from Netware so NDS was't competing against the Microsoft installed base directly.
d) Hence NDS would gain marketshare and NDS-based-services would be a source of revenue for Novell.
e) A 8 billion dollar company taking a big piece of a pie called important by a 400 billion dollar company is going to make a lot of money.

This all goes to hell (in public perception) if Microsoft actually comes out with directory services-no matter how crippled-, so the first thing we need to know is-- will Microsoft actually be coming out with directory services in the next 6 months? I'm not saying Novell won't succeed, I'm just saying the perception problems for Novell will come back with a vengeance for a while.

The next thing we need to know is how will Win2000 directory services run in a mixed environment. Ok, the easy answer is "not at all." But what if MSFT comes out with "Win2000 directory client services for Win98/Unix/...?" or something like that? How hard is that to do?
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