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

To: PJ Strifas who wrote (32048)	5/27/2000 11:49:00 PM
From: Captain Jack	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42771

P J -- Poor msft! ;-]--- Enjoyed your perspective. They have been a great stock to own and will soon become the best buy going as the continue to slide. When it turns it will run hard, no matter how many of them there are, Certainly glad to be out right now but chomping at the bit awaiting to get back in. NOVL has some great products to compete with msft. msft's competeing products are sub-par in comparison but novl still cannot compete... thats not the fault of msft.. Then things like this remind us just how things may go next week,,, See $6? My guess is 7 will not hold as I said days ago. TOKYO, May 28 (Reuters) - Tokyo investors are bracing for another volatile week for high-tech stocks, which are expected to continue nervously tracking their U.S. counterparts. "Some investors are now scared the market's scenario may shift from a correction in information technology stocks toward a hard-landing in the U.S. economy," said Masatoshi Sato, equities manager at Kankaku Securities in Tokyo. Traders forecast the benchmark Nikkei average <.N225> will trade between 15,800 to 16,500 this week, shifting restlessly in line with the U.S. Nasdaq <.IXIC> index. The Nikkei ended last week at 16,008.14, down 1.48 percent on Friday and five percent lower for the week. It has managed to post a gain in only three of the past 15 trading days. "It's becoming harder to guess when the selling will really stop, with everyone just waiting for clear signs of a Nasdaq recovery," said Toshihiko Matsuno, deputy manager of the investment advisory section at Sakura Friend Securities in Tokyo. The Nasdaq fell 0.24 of a point to close at 3,205.11 on Friday, down 185 points on the week. The Dow Jones Industrial Average <.DJI> eased 24.86 points to 10,299.24 in sluggish trade ahead the long Memorial Day weekend. More losses on the Nasdaq composite index <.IXIC> would raise fears of further selling, in particular by U.S. investors who need to raise cash to cover losses at home, traders said. Such concerns have been weighing most on shares in companies like electronics giant Sony Corp <6758.T> and Internet investor Softbank Corp <9984.T>, former favourites of foreign investors. Sony fell more than 10 percent last week to 9,680 yen. Softbank, which has suffered sharp losses recently, rose strongly last week. It closed up by its daily limit or 12.42 percent on Friday at 18,100 yen, on news it planned to eventually take several group holding companies public and on expectations ahead of its earnings results announced later in the day. Softbank announced after the market closed on Friday its group net profit plummeted 77 percent in the past year, but stayed in the black thanks to one-off gains from the sale of some of the company's vast shareholdings. FOCUS ON VALUE Strategists and dealers said the best bet was to avoid technology stocks for a while and focus on value stocks from sectors such as retailing, utilities and heavy industries. Friday afternoon was the peak of the earnings announcement season, which traders said generally showed slow but sure signs of recovery. But the overall impact on the market was limited because of the prevailing uncertainty. "Recent economic data showed that the economy is on the right path toward recovery. But when market sentiment is weak, people tend to focus on bearish factors such as possible instability ahead of the general election," said Takashi Miyazaki, Partners Asset Management's senior strategist.

To: PJ Strifas who wrote (32048)	5/28/2000 1:19:00 AM
From: Sir Francis Drake	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42771

Well, Peter, I never maintained that MSFT was not culpable in the way they conducted themselves once they were a monopoly. They have done irreperable harm to consumers and companies. They abused their power, and competed illegally. Netscape? Yes - abuse, no doubt. But again - that was all once they were a monopoly. I do not agree that they got to be a monopoly by using illegal means. Of course, I'm not maintaining that they were pure as driven snow back then (show me a company that has ever been that, in the history of business), just that BY AND LARGE, they got to become a monopoly by a combination of strategy, luck, and COMPETITORS' incompetence. The IBM OS/2 situation was not just the fault of MSFT - it was even more a case of IBM blowing it, again. I don't want to argue over how MSFT became a monopoly - that would "require a book", as you put it. I believe they become one mostly NOT thanks to dirty tricks (i.e. whatever petty abuses they engaged in, were not the primary factors in their rise to dominance). Monoplies CAN arise naturally - they don't always, and not every industry has monopolies. But there is nothing necessarily injurious to consumers when a monopoly arises by fair competition. The problem w/ MSFT is that they have abused their power, and broken the law, injured competitors and consumers. What to do now - that is the question. Opening up the OEM agreements would only be the first step, but much, much more is needed. I'm afraid that forbidding bundling is not realistic - I sort of buy into the MSFT argument that they must be allowed to evolve their OS. After all, the lines blur of what is a "native" OS and when does functionality become an application. What they should not be allowed to do, is destroy companies the way they did Netscape. How to prevent that, and still allow them to evolve their OS is a complex question, and I don't think we can write that particular book on this board. The only purpose of my original post was to register a protest against what I saw as a seeming opposition to the very idea of a monopoly, and the lack of acknowlegement of the culpability of many lesser competitors in their own demise or lack of succes. Apple's problems were deeper than not opening up their hardware. And I think you overdo the argument that "there's not one company out there that can create a great app and not look over their shoulder for MSFT to come down and possibly crush them solely because of the market position MSFT enjoys!" - MSFT has neither the resources nor the time nor the programming troops to control/absorb/copy all the sofware that's out there. There is too much going on out there and the times when everything was revolving around Windows have long since passed. With open source, Linux the revived unix platforms etc. MSFT looks more like a dinosaur fighting for its life than some all-powerful death star. Relax - competition is alive and well, and eating MSFT's lunch. MSFT will never control the net, they are being destroyed in the hand-held market, and are failing in the server market too. They can continue to milk their legacy desktop customers (at least for some time) the way IBM does their mainframes, but that's not a path to dominance. Morgan