Novell (NOVL) dirt cheap, good buy? Message Board

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Technology Stocks : Novell (NOVL) dirt cheap, good buy?

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To: Frederick Smart who wrote (28185)	9/20/1999 12:03:00 PM
From: PJ Strifas	Read Replies (1) of 42771

Hello Fredrick, It's true that there still is a mindset within Novell which doesn't see the forest for the trees (or vice versa) but I'm not at all sure that the success/failure of NT/NetWare can correlate into this new era we are in. <<Novell can't quid pro quo NDS like they tried to do with Netware. The Netware vs. NT battle was lost in the field of application development. Novell just made it too damn hard for companies to develop to their APIs. Microsoft, on the other hand, made it very easy for companies to develop to their APIs. And remember, in the beginning NT really stood for "nothing there" yet Microsoft schmoozed app developers with their commitment to "open up.">> This same approach which so won over developers is also showing signs of wear and tear. Over the last few years, developers have been jumping off the proprietary bandwagon known as Win32 for the openness and freedom of web-based technologies. There are several reasons for this: 1) There's more growth in the web than Win32 platform. 2) Cross-platform compatibility and convergence will drive software sales beyond the PC era. 3) The Palm phenomenon is just the tip of the iceberg, devices will shrink, functionality will grow (if only we had another space race to accelerate this) people will get connected from varying devices. 4) "Webtone" will be a reality sooner rather than later. Microsoft has also shown a propensity for allowing developers to create products and more importantly markets only to release a similar component within their OS (for free) and steal much thunder from the originator(s). Also the very thing that made Microsoft's platform so easy to develop for is showing problems with quality assurance, compatibility (even between MSFT products), security and performance. The Second Wave of the internet is going to demand more from an operating system than we currently see and understand. In what ways I'm not exactly sure but I would guess that performance and accessibility will be tops on the list with security an ever present factor. Microsoft only hopes to mirror their dominance in desktops in dominance in the browser (and webserver) market. In this way, they hope to "own" the end-user experience which will inevitably grant them much power. Their continued success will hinge on their ability to translate the desktop market into a "webtop" market (IMHO). The problem with that strategy is the "plumbing" aspect. We know the limitation of their products to provide the framework necessary to sustain a "Microsoft-only" solution from content source to end-user client requests that will negate any other product or even a "best-of-breed" solution. It's true that not even Novell can hope for that much but when you look at the solution from a best-of-breed perspective, Novell offers a great deal of the plumbing (or framework) to make much of Mr. Gates vision a reality here and now...... (IMHO). Peter J Strifas

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