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Technology Stocks : INPR - Inprise to Borland (BORL) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: i-node who wrote (4749)	3/22/2000 9:42:00 AM
From: Lewis Edinburg	Read Replies (5) \| Respond to of 5102

The article had this in it. The talks, triggered by the release of Corel's devastating first quarter results and the subsequent share price fall, have been held informally following a special meeting late Monday of Inprise Corp.'s board of directors. "We were looking at the results and seeing if we could be of some help," said Inprise chairman William Miller, a business professor at Stanford University. "There are a lot of conversations going on between Inprise and Corel." I find this even more depressing. What is Inprise going to do, lower the price it sold itself for before? Corel has no cash so the only way they can buy Inprise is through a stock only deal. If I wanted to be associated with Corel, and all the baggage it carries, I would have bought its stock. What does Corel really have to offer to further the growth of Inprise? I don't think it has anything that really fits into Inprise's future. We should never have gotten into this mess; and I don't just mean the relative valuations of the two companies. The deal just doesn't make sense on so many levels! The reason the article bothers me is that I feel Inprise's Board should be talking about how to extricate themselves from this mess; not how to prop up Corel (which appears to be on its way to self-destructing unless they can find someone to give them a big cash infusion (Does $250 million sound nice?) right away. If the terms of the acquisition are changed, don't the papers have to be resubmitted to the SEC (or whoever is reviewing them now)? That's all we need right now! To delay the vote even longer before we have a chance to try to dissociate ourselves from Corel. If this were the Titanic, and the BOD were the captain, it would be like "OK we hit an iceberg. We haven't sunk to the bottom of the ocean yet. Let's back up the boat and take another run at the iceberg and see if we can do some real damage." What are these board members smoking?