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

To: areokat who wrote (22546)	4/11/2000 12:05:00 PM
From: Mike Buckley	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 54805

Tom, I'm just wondering if PSFT stock might do an ORCL in the future. To get a handle on the likelihood of that happening, you might want to consider the assets ORCL had at their disposal to leverage vs. the assets at PSFT's disposal. It's my thinking that being the Gorilla of the enterprise relational database space put Oracle at the nucleus of all enterprise apps opportunities in a way not possible being the Gorilla of the HR space. Just my opinion. --Mike Buckley

To: areokat who wrote (22546)	4/11/2000 12:12:00 PM
From: Thomas Mercer-Hursh	Respond to of 54805

The problem I see with PSFT is that they managed to achieve their gorilla status in HR and seem to be doing reasonably well there, but they have failed to execute on using that position to develop strong positions in other markets. They seem to me to be a classic case study for the principle that achieving gorilladom provides one with substantial potential, but one still has to execute on that potential by developing new products which produce their own tornado. Part of the problem may simply be that ERP software isn't a very likely tornado zone; part may be that in that market they are running up against existing royalty without having any discontinuous innovation; and part may be just failure to execute. Seems to me they are post-tornado in HR, which is not a small market, but which is constrained, and there is no immediate reason to think they are going to achieve similar levels of success in other areas at this point.