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

To: zwolff who wrote (30929)	4/10/2000 8:47:00 PM
From: Paul Fiondella	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 42771

Novell's future Novell isn't going to fix any of its real problems anytime soon. The mistake management has and is making is to think that because the company is profitable, then they have room and time in which to indirectly rather than directly address the persistent problems. Adam's attempt to focus the company on a marketing matrix is just another in a long series of attempts to move forward slowly. It isn't fast enough. It isn't direct enough. And it fails to address "the process" of marketing Novell technology --- what actually happens with good ideas. What is wrong with Novell? I attended Brainshare and I saw first hand the technology Novell has. Drew major is working on the first Internet Operating System. As Scott said: "The one huge advantage that Drew has is that he has created an appliance platform so much more efficient that anyone else, he has the processing "headroom" to support a lot of applications." Those are flow control, filtering, attached storage, and redirection type applications that sit at the heart of the bandwidth problems facing companies that need to minimize their internet bandwidth costs. This is the internet infrastructure that we hear the execs at Novell spouting. But are they talking about it to the analysts? No. Are they marketing it? No. Do they have a clue as to how to market it? No. Will Stewarts crew ever ever have a clue? No. To listen to the management at Novell you would think there isn't anything in what Drew is doing to talk to the analysts about. Its just some future stuff they can't comprehend! (It is the core of what the company has to offer the internet.) These products exist in abundance at Novell. Its not just Drew but the nature of Novell itself. It is an engineering company. ITs engineers generate ideas into products spontaneously, they don't need management to tell them what to create. THEY JUST DO IT!!! They come up with good ideas which then rot. The problem with the company is that everything about Novell from product management at the project level to marketing direction for the product, everything that takes a product from where the engineers conceive of it to its commercialization is screwed up at Novell. Totally screwed up. And worse unaddressed in any systematic methodical businesslike fashion. They simply haven't got a clue about how to commercialize a product or why they haven't been able to successfully do so. So which CEO is going to replace and I mean replace most of the marketing and product management staff from the ground up? Which CEO is going to commission a study of the process which caused digitalme to run off the tracks or which will take Eguide off the tracks? Which CEO is going to look at the way the company has failed to get its most promising technologies to market? Which CEO is going to set up an end user group within Novell which just focuses upon getting the word NOVELL in your face with easy to use eGuide type products? Did you answer Eric Schmidt?