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Technology Stocks : Novell (NOVL) dirt cheap, good buy? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jonathan Thomas who wrote (27673)	8/12/1999 10:17:00 AM
From: Paul Fiondella	Respond to of 42771

You are missing the area of competition MSFT is busy building up it's ISP customer base with the computer giveaways. That is where it intends to go after AOL. It will do so in partnership with the greedy cable monopolies. Today's deal is primarily a benefit to AOL on the surface. AOL gets access to millions of corporate accounts for its advertising. That is how the market perceives it. The question is does the partnership extend to AOL using NDS internally for it's customer base. In my opinion it has to AND THE MARKET HAS MISSED THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THAT FOR NOVELL.

To: Jonathan Thomas who wrote (27673)	8/12/1999 10:20:00 AM
From: Pruguy	Respond to of 42771

a lot....tons of people actually compete effectively with msft.....other than windows,nt and powerpoint, I'm not so sure that msft is very dominating at all.....here are a few companies y9ou may have heard of whose main competition is msft, Oracle, Realnetworks, AOL, Novell directory systems(in 80%of fortune 1000 companies)Intuit....so many others can mention I am sure...microsoft is to be feared but not to the point of saying it can't be done, many comopaniers have beaten msft handily and many more as they continue to miss the whole concept of open standards on the net

To: Jonathan Thomas who wrote (27673)	8/12/1999 11:02:00 AM
From: EPS	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 42771

AOL needs to give its customers better services. That or MSFT will simply kill it by giving away whatever it is that AOL sells. Instant messaging is an AOL favorite. Soon other areas of competition like broader bandwith will heat up as communication systems evolve in the inexorable direction of convergence. The AOL alliance with NOVL means that AOL will be able in short order to improve its instant messaging services, to integrate those services with other IPs, and to battle MSFT in an area where MSFT is weak. Moreover, AOL also gets 40 mill eye balls of corporate users which together with its already substantial number of corporate customers opens up for AOL a whole new set of possibilities they could undertake with corporations/ small business/credit card/banks... as well as media companies/telcos and cable providers as they position themselves for the bandwith battle. To organize the battle in this order is to AOLs advantage and is another good move by Case. Indeed this is actually the one area where AOL is weak. For NOVL this is a major win win win. We seem to be going in a direction where directories are going to enable everything on the internet. From E-commerce to communications to...and as Fiondella says NOVL is well on its way to make NDS an internet standard. NOVL should start to provide APIs to developers. Open structures make it easy to predict that in short order there will hundreds of new Digitalme NDS applications.. Cheers! Victor

To: Jonathan Thomas who wrote (27673)	8/12/1999 12:14:00 PM
From: PJ Strifas	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42771

We can't gauge the immediate impact of this deal for Novell's revenues for some time. Right now, I can say this -- It's a great day for Novell. Why? First, they have managed to make a partner of the biggest online service/content player in the world. Novell touts itself as being the technology leader, someone who can build the best "plumbing" for your solutions. If they can showcase NDS and NDS-related products on the biggest stage yet known, what kind of message does that send to everyone else? Second, Instant Messaging for those of you who don't have it or don't use it is the next step in personal communications. Right now, you need a computer with client software and access via traditional services. What happens when the client runs on say a PDA or cell phone or an IP phone on my desk and access is ubiquitous? This is very powerful stuff. Forget what we have here and now in terms of instant messaging and take a look into the future. Go to Qualcomm's website and look into the pdQ phone as an example. Next level we have to look at is the business-to-business sector. Creating and managing relationships for business users to be able to communicate in real time with suppliers, service providers and more can be very alluring to many companies. For example, the ability to order, check status and keep informed of deliveries is just a simple example of what can be done. Think of FedEx and UPS in this space.... I could go on and I'm sure Fredrick can tell you more about the financial industry. I know that Instant Messaging from a business standpoint has yet to be developed and sold to this market as a productivity tool. I don't kid myself, MSFT realizes the need for leadership in this space for many reasons. They could throw all the money in the world into this but without a system in place that can rival what AOL is doing it's an uphill battle. Even if they were to create or "integrate" Instant Messaging into their Windows products (or Outlook), they still need a back-end system for everythign to work on. Let's not forget the convergence of voice and data systems. One day in the not too distant future, phone services will run on the same networks as data services. Once our phone systems go to an internet standards-type technology, then instant messaging becomes more than just something you do with your buddies on AOL. If I have an IP phone on my desk that can be take the place of my PC and the client software necessary to communicate, then the obstacle to use instant messaging disappears. Peter J Strifas