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Strategies & Market Trends : Gorilla and King Portfolio Candidates -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bruce Brown who wrote (5115)	8/22/1999 9:59:00 PM
From: Mike Buckley	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 54805

Bruce, Yes, I remember you well. How did you find your way over here? Regardless, you're a welcome addition to our thread. Now that Siebel is number one in 'Americas Fastest Growing Companies' I'm certainly ready to chat more. I think that stat is being blown a little bit, if not a lot, out of proportion. That growth is not entirely internal. I doubt the stat would be true were it not for the acquisition of Scopus a little more than a year ago. On the other hand, Cisco has grown tremendously by a combination of internal and acquisitive growth, so I don't mean to completely dispell the importance of the stat. I just think it's being overblown. For me, the most important fact is that Siebel's front office software business has for a very long time (prior to the acquistion of Scopus) been the fastest growing applications software business in the history of applications. It's very difficult to know about Oracle's product. Technically, they've had product out for a long time. But it hasn't been marketable to any significant extent. If you visit the Siebel folder here at SI you'll find posts written by industry insiders who insist they know Oracle reps who refuse to sell the front office apps as a stand-alone product because they simply don't work unless deployed in tandem with other product. I'm not technically proficient enough -- ummm, I'm technically illiterate -- to know why that's the case, but what's important is that it might in fact be the case. For the first time, I've actually seen a press release issued by a customer saying they bought Oracle front office software. Larry Ellison would have us believe that his company sold $45 million in front office software last quarter, but I've read that analysts and others question the credibility of that. As for the message from Geoff Moore, I think it's terrific of him to be so conciliatory and appreciative. Yet I can't help thinking that all he had to do was visit over here. In a week or so he would have had it all figured out. :) In this weekend that we've had some discussion about the harm of group-think, it's ironic that his thread came so late to the conclusions about Qualcomm that we came to months ago. That probably happened because of the group-think mentality that initially tended not to question their expert author who was leading the forum. The dangers of group-think work in both directions. I hope you hang around and participate in a meaningful way. I've participated in Geoff Moore's thread and the Fool's Gorilla Game threads at the web site and on AOL, the latter which was started by yours truly. None of those threads in my opinion begin to compare with this one for a lot of reasons I won't bore you with. I hope you find this as entertaining, educational, and important to your net worth as I do. --Mike Buckley