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

To: EPS who wrote (31053)	4/15/2000 6:56:00 PM
From: Paul Fiondella	Respond to of 42771

NOVL positioning I agree with you that if Novell is able to maintain revenue growth and meet earnings expectations it would have a chance to take its positive cash flow and accumulated resources and buy faltering undercapitalized dot.com companies. But there are a few things that people overlook. To do this successfully you have to be entrenched in those areas where you expect to lead and acquire. To do that Novell has to adopt an Internet Operating Systems approach to the internet and then look at whom it competes with and whom it might acquire. Novell clearly has not got the focus yet to do these things. It has so many products which have not yet been plugged into a cohesive marketing matrix like DENIM. IT has very weak product management. I'm not even sure that many product managers know what to do with the technology the engineers are developing. They don't know how to commercialize the unbelievable technology Novell has because they don't get it. The first task of marketing is to get in the trenches and plug all of the Dir-et-ceteras into DENIM to see where everything fits. What are we selling? Even more important is to take the original intent of products like Eguide and digitalme and commercialize that intent not bend it to managerial misconceptions. Too much time is spent in middle management at Novell taking what the engineers have already figured out and implimented and then redoing it with a totally different and often totally out of touch political agenda. This leads me to believe that the managers at Novell do not understand what the engineers at Novell are doing. They are way way behind the visionaries in the company and have become an obstacle rather than a facilitator of innovation. If I was in management at Novell I would insist that every product follow the intent of the initiators until it had been commercialized and tested by the marketplace. This marketplace innovator interaction is what characterizes start-ups. At Novell the most obvious products for grabbing eyeballs never seen to make it. Taking the product away from people who understand what it was developed for, as was done to digitalme is fatal. Novell has a serious problem here which they are not looking at as PROCESS. What is the process we use to commercialize our technologies? Does it work? Where does it fail? They just don't seem to want to do this analysis. I guess its too much hard work for management.

To: EPS who wrote (31053)	4/16/2000 1:57:00 AM
From: ToySoldier	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 42771

I have a bad feeling that Monday will not be a great day on the market. In fact, I feel that the markets will be correcting for much of the week before it finds a stable bottom. I do agree that NOVL share price will be good in the long run - but - it will be pulled down with the markets for a while. This would be great for those that want to dollar cost average into NOVL during this rough market ride. I feel that a lot of margin calls will occur Monday which will create a spirally drop of the markets. I would bet there will be a lot of bargin hunters out looking but they will be completely over-whelmed by the margin-calls and panicing investors. This major over-confidence style of investing must be cleaned out before the correction stabilizes and finds a base. And with the longest bull run in the US's economic history, there is a lot of cleaning out to occur. I could be completely wrong on this prediction but I think Monday will look much like Friday (if not worse). This market activity is also the big .COM cleanup that I think many of the longer-term "fundamental" investors and analysts have been waiting to happen (I am one of them). Not that I am happy to see it but it was sooo predictable. That is why I mentioned about 4 weeks ago on this board that I felt uncomfortable and moved much of my postions out of the tech sectors (as I wipe the sweat from my brow in relief). What has really annoyed me over the past couple years is when respected Analysts were stating that the "Growth Potential" of these .COM companies were the new rule in investing over the long followed "fundamentals" approach to investing. Although growth potential should be taken into account to some extent, fundamentals should be the major criteria in my opinion. It was inevitable that the .COM stock-price house of cards had to collapse. The problem the whole global economy has to face is that this lengthy violation of the "fundamentals" investment style is now slamming down all the Tech sector and the general markets. It will take one hell of a correction to clean out the .COM abuses. In the long run, this is a healthy process to allow the next phase of the Internet economy to begin. The "Wild-Wild West" Internet economy phase has now officially ended as far as I am concerned. I think you will see many of the future Internet start-ups following a more well balanced development of a business creation. Business that do not simply have a good technical idea, but also have put a LOT more analysis toward target markets, shorter ROI break-even dates, and revenue that is not soley based on "advertising Revenue" as an example. What I would love to see and we will NEVER see is to have someone publicly review which of these well-respected Industry/Market Analysts made this "New Economy" non-fundamental styles of investment. Unfortunately they will all either be crawling under rocks or coming out and saying "I told you all that this potential growth" investment style was all wrong and dangerous. I sure hope that the big fund managers are buying into some of the blue chip tech stocks that have been caught into the collapsing markets. The CSCO, ORCL, LU, and list of a few others would be good buys after Monday's predicted slam. Call me biased, but I would keep my hands right off MSFT for the forseeable future. I predicted MSFT's stock move 2 years ago while I was on the MSFT board. I predicted the attack of the "Wolves" that would flatten and even crap out the MSFT stock. My predictions have just started to take effect, but I see more bad months ahead for MSFT as more "Wolves" will join the feast of the bleeding beast. Just my opinions. I guess we'll see. Toy