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

To: Scott C. Lemon who wrote (28176)	11/5/1999 11:37:00 PM
From: Jack Whitley	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 42771

But my question was: >> ... if (or when?) Novell comes to dominate the access to networked >> resources through distributed name spaces in NDS directories ... >> and no one anywhere on earth can get to a resource unless it's >> through a Novell directory ... what will you be saying then? >> Will you be one of the people who starts the early efforts to say >> to Novell "Hey guys ... that's enough ... we have a {x}% >> marketshare and are making enough money."? <<There are two questions in the scenario above that I would like to hear you address ... not by saying that it won't can't happen (there were a lot of people that said that about Microsoft in the 80's and early 90's) but let's assume that Novell is successful at building the partnerships, getting NDS onto a wide range of platforms and tying digitalme into all this. What if it happened ... then what would you say?>> I would say that Novell prevailed in a cross-platform environment where they had to have a better product to win, an environment where controlling and bloating development timelines with restrictive licenses was not an option. A company that was TRULY the "fittest", as you give MSFT credit for being. Also, you are telling me to "imagine" above, yet when I point out to you that we need to understand and quantify the opportunity cost we have paid in personal and business productivity losses due to being shackled by Windows licenses, you say "you can't say that, because we don't know what we have lost". The bell started tolling today Scott, the company that has been touting products like "Forthcoming Windows NT 5.0", "Forthcoming Windows 2000", "Forthcoming Active Directory", "Forthcoming Kerberos Security" (you know, they could make a claim for FORTHCOMING as a secondary mark through use) and on and on, for THREE YEARS (21 Internet years?), and telling us to **ck Off if we didn't like it, is being exposed for the bloated group they are. When their monopoly driven pre-load revenue stream goes away, and they have to sell product based on providing better value, we will see how well your definition of the "fittest" company performs. I can't wait to watch. Hey, here's an example on which to possibly forecast the future - They paid $400 million dollars for Hotmail in 1996, have lost money on it every year, can't get even a portion of it off of UNIX onto NT Server without totally blowing it up, and can't sell it to anyone for even a fraction of what they paid for it. Wow. jww