My view of these stocks is primarily technological and for that reason I rarely post here anymore: the self-professed technologists have little or no idea what's going on in the industry. If I was administering first-aid, I wouldn't go into bio-tech forums and spray them with glib comments about the state of gene therapy. That seems to be what we're dealing here with some of the experts on the thread: they know almost nothing and somehow have convinced themselves that everybody else is on the same boat -- not to disparage some of the obvious exceptions, they know who they are. Case in point: Java has utterly dominated the direction of distributed technology and, combined with XML, it continues to do so. At its peak, there were maybe a half dozen Delphi books on a given bookstore shelve; Java is still increasing in popularity yet there are racks of books available. Publications are an excellent metric in gauging the overall impact and penetration of a technology.
Don't get me wrong, I don't expect most traders to know how to even spell Java; that's not the point of these fora. The problem is people who do profess to be technologists on the thread continue to advertise their mindboggling ignorance, thereby thwarting any intelligent discussion of corporate direction.
I don't think Corel/Inprise will be bought because Sun and IBM passed up on Inprise for years. Inprise was an obvious center of attention and garnered a lot of attention. In the end they got a big thumbs down. Corel has made every effort to ensure they have no credibility and exists simply as a trading stock. They have give-away products and that's getting more difficult quarterly. They fail 9 times out of 10 and they have had only 9 major, disasterous efforts. In other words, the 9 out of 10 failures is a projection since there are no successes.
Inprise is better given they have completed the alpha test of JBuilder (they call it 3.0 but 1.0 and 2.0 were fiascos) and Delphi still has some sales along with C++Builder. Now, the Inprise Application Server demonstrates that they don't get it yet. It's as though they didn't see that several million (perhaps an exaggeration) other companies were building App Servers and some how they would float to the top past IBM, Sun, Silverstream, Netscape and so on. Dumb, very dumb.
In short, Corel is a divisor rather than a multiplier. The synergy of two companies can oftentimes make the whole more valuable than the sum of its parts. It's a cliche that does not hold here. Rather than this being the power of two, it's the square root of two. Take the conceptual value of each; now add them and take the square root. |
