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

To: Villemure who wrote (31638)	5/16/2000 4:09:00 PM
From: Frederick Smart	Respond to of 42771

1995-1996: The Dam Building Legacy.... >>In 1995, Firmage wrote an excellent white paper for Novell called "The Smart Global Network," which he described as "the merger of LANs, WANs and the Internet into a single system managed by NDS." Very similar to today's "One net." People I'm interviewing for my paper on Novell's marketing troubles stated that Novell feared that customers would interpret the Smart Global Network as something proprietary and different from the Internet and therefore decided to abandon the whole strategy. One lesson for Novell today is to firmly associate DENIM and One net with e-business or Internet business. Another lesson: stay the course! Also interesting: Novell paid Marketing guru Doc Searles of recent "Clue Train" fame to develop a strategy presentation in 1996. Sources tell me that Searles came to the conclusion that Novell needed to positon itself as a "Net Services" company, but his ideas never got the support in the company they needed to influence other marketing. I believe that Novell should have done more with the NetWare brand and the very successful "NetWare Yes" campaign that was a high water point in its marketing. NetWare is such a perfect name for a whole family of Net Services software. Why not just sell, "NetWare network operating systems, NetWare UNIX operating systems, NetWare email, NetWare Desktop Management, NetWare Directory Services, etc...." Announce the next revision of the entire family once each year at BrainShare. Spend the rest of the year marketing solutions to customers and end users. Novell apparently got off this track because people associated NetWare with proprietary protocols and an isolated file and print platform. Hindsight is golden, but my thesis is that this was Novell's crucial mistake. They had a great brand and should have evolved/expanded it to signify a whole, unified family of Net Services products that supports One Net and works on multiple platforms. I believe this missed opportunity contributed to the split personality that has since afflicted Novell, with NetWare on one side and "the other stuff" on the other. It led to the devaluing of one of high tech's greatest brands (perversely, Novell was the unwitting leader in this devaluation process) and a steadily more confusing goobledygook of product names and categories.>> Villemure: Thanks for the review of the historical legacy that can help us all understand some of the who/what/when/where/how and why Novell took a wrong turn and went deeper down a closed/proprietary power/control NetWare wooded path. I now have a greater historical appreciation for why Doc Searles, Firmage and many others left Novell. There's another individual who got spit out along this path: John Edwards. We can all laugh at these departures for the way the "dam" system triumphed over some "individual" energies. I have crossed paths with Edwards at I-Link where I have a substantial investment of time, trust and money. There's another company which such stupendous potential but it all really hinges on the need for a mindset shift toward more trust and openness. I'm not sure why I am called to spend so much time with individuals and companies located in the Valley. If I'm delt cards I simply play them. As for the review above, it's facinating to "see" and understand how a closed mindset shift actually derailed Novell for the long term. There's the audit trail. Need we say anything more? Since the closed, power/control dam building path has proven itself to be lacking in energy and results, it's now time to explode this model outward and onward. A reuniting of all the Firmage's and Doc Searles of the world with this emerging "Open Source Energy" movement is what's needed. >>People I'm interviewing for my paper on Novell's marketing troubles stated that Novell feared that customers would interpret the Smart Global Network as something proprietary and different from the Internet and therefore decided to abandon the whole strategy. One lesson for Novell today is to firmly associate DENIM and One net with e-business or Internet business. Another lesson: stay the course!>> If Novell would embrace this New Openness and empowering energy Firmages's Smart Global Network could become a reality. No pun intended, it's really a question of their mindset - not the "smart" label. Everywhere I look there are these NOT.COM platforms recreating the wheel in a desparate attempt to claim/possess the time, trust, data, information and profile of the INDIVIDUAL. I don't believe technology creates and maintains TRUST. I believe this is the final frontier domain of empowered INDIVIDUALS who have a evangelical single minded value-set which is focused on "helping and serving others." Anything beyond "helping and serving others" is just a facade which, exposed to the Internet Spirit, will have a time-life energy value of a spinning top. Once the money and dazzle slows down there is no more energy. For it requires external ad-related energy to keep the "spin" going. When I look at Novell today I get the impression of all this "spinning tops" with no core heart, soul and direction. For the INDIVIDUAL to drive anything, they need to have confidence that there's a heart/soul/purpose behind where they are and the people they relate to. More than that, for them to take Step # 1 in to TRUST, they absolutely need to have CONTROL extended to them by others - in the form of tools, services, goodwill, risk. All I can say is, "Let's go Don." Do you need me to order those fantastic flying 50 RUG T-Shirts? Did you get someone to volunteer to do the logo? I'm ready. Let's GO!! Peace.

To: Villemure who wrote (31638)	5/16/2000 4:32:00 PM
From: p friend	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 42771

FYI from RB thread By: drouin1 Reply To: 11257 by MorayMan Sunday, 14 May 2000 at 1:45 PM EDT Post # of 11304 Here is a letter from Peter Troup in Novell Investor Relations. Eric has read your message and asked me to respond. I'm director investor relations. First off, the company very much appreciates your frustration, and is starkly aware of how it needs to perform. Separate of the Q2 pre-announcement, Dennis Raney, the CFO has said that he intends for the company to regularly buy-back shares as it goes forward. So additional repurchase proposals, beyond what has already been approved, will be brought to the board for consideration. Over the last 18 months Novell has maintained its cash balance at almost $1 billion while spending over $900 million of cash generated from operations to repurchase its common shares. Per-seat directory pricing isn't seen as the issue. But Novell believes that management and organizational shortcomings in sales represent real issues. The company is very disappointed in the channel revenue fall-off and its impact on fiscal Q2. Inadequate sales forecasting led to $10 million a week declines in forecast for each of the last five weeks of the quarter. On Tuesday of last week we announced the appointment of a new senior vp of worldwide sales, Nicholas A. Tiliacos most recently with Lucent. The issues he needs to address relate to the channel situation, but also direct selling efforts. They include: - - poor quota management, with numerous changes undercutting sales efforts - - delays in effective sales segmentation that aggravated channel conflict - - limited channel support and engagement in the face of aggressive training and product introductory efforts by major competitors - - the need to complete the transition of Novell's sales teams to solution selling. All the issues relate to the business changes underway in the company. It's change that is coming harder and taking more time to get done than we anticipated. The company is in the midst of adopting new go-to-market strategies that address a new Net services market, have us entering the Internet and ASP market, while also targeting an expansion of sales from both existing and new customers from our traditional enterprise network management market. But ultimately revenue performance matters first for Novell and its shareholders. The financial community wants to see strong revenue growth as reassurance that Novell's strategy is right. Even before the Q2 pre-announcement, many took the company's revenue growth over the last two quarters as a disappointment. Q4 of FY99 was up 16% year-over-year. Q1 of FY00 was up 11%. Now we've announced that total Q2 FY00 revenue will be down from the $316 million reported in FY99 to just over $300 million. It is taking the company more time than it, and many in the financial community had hoped, to deliver the revenue growth that is needed. Novell is entering new markets - - Solaris, Linux, xSPs and the Internet - - with new products, it is engaging established customers around new Net services offerings. But the company is also encountering lengthened selling cycles, and now significant disruption in the traditional computer reseller channel. The company is confident that it will ultimately succeed in these new markets, and more broadly as a business to business Internet software provider... but it will take time, we've said at least the next six months, to address the sales issues. The degree to which the company succeeds, or not, will now depend on how effective it can be in business and sales execution. Finally, the company isn't for sale for a number of reasons that tie to optimizing shareholder return... first at current price levels the company believes it is far undervalued. Especially so, because irrespective of the immediate business issues that the company is facing, Novell is as confident as ever in its one Net vision, Net services product strategy, and the long-term market opportunity they represent. The company understands your frustration, and very much appreciates your support.... Peter Troop Investor Relations

To: Villemure who wrote (31638)	5/16/2000 4:48:00 PM
From: kilo_watt	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 42771

Why would you want to waste time and effort creating a critique of actions that took place 3-4 years ago? In fact, what's the point of rehashing and reviewing Novell's "failures"? If we hadn't preannounced our miss for this Q, none of what you're writing about would be relevant at all. The truly compelling story isn't about beating us up for past misgivings, but about how we're going to get from where we are to where we need to be in the context of this extraordinarily dynamic industry. Frankly, we're at a time when nobody really cares about something so esoteric as Novell's past marketing blunders. Other than gratuitously taking a "pile on" position, what's the point? Even MSFT doesn't waste their breath reminding people that Novell hasn't marketed well in the past. You can talk "shoulda coulda woulda" all you want, but why bash Novell? What does anyone have to gain from that? Heck, if you want to bash us why don't you go all the way back to the WordPerfect acquisition and divestiture? Sources tell me that 1996 was an eon ago relative to the industry, and I challenge you to show me one high-tech company that hasn't practically reinvented itself in the past four years. I am amazed at individuals with only speculative insight into the workings of a billion-dollar business that think they can distill the total solution to that business' problems in one hypothetical sentence. "Why not just sell 'NetWare...?'" Why not just start a startup, do a successful IPO and become a multimillionaire, Villemure? Why haven't you done that yet??? It's the same logic.