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Technology Stocks : Siebel Systems (SEBL) - strong buy? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Trader Dave who wrote (3593)	6/1/2000 12:08:00 PM
From: Beltropolis Boy	Respond to of 6974

>they overpaid for the burdens of a dying company. and in Euros for chrissakes! here's a thought: perhaps they could sell off their Aurum CRM modules to, uh, Hasso? btw, if you're not getting enough nyuks from this message board ("Bann fire sale?" genius! tekboy is out of his brilliant mind), pick up the jun 12 issue of Fortune for the piece on SAP. fair warning: a la NYPD Blue, contains obligatory male butt shot! an excerpt: "...Plattner has no problem with startup companies breaking new ground as long as it's at the margins of the business software market. "This is a good thing with the Internet," he says. "There are thousands of small companies developing things that hadn't been there before." However, Plattner is confident that most of these Wunderkinder will fall by the wayside long before they grow big enough to challenge SAP. He says that's why Ariba ultimately is "irrelevant." (Plattner would say the same about Commerce One, presumably, except that SAP was discussing a partnership with that company as this issue went to press.) "The real players," he says, "are Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, and SAP." "I agree with Hasso," says Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. "Hasso's problem is not Ariba or Commerce One or Siebel. Hasso's problem is us." Indeed, Oracle haunts Plattner's thoughts. It is the company he just can't get away from. For one thing, there's its irritating CEO, currently the richest man on earth. "There are more interesting people in the world," Plattner grumbles. "I think the U.S. is making a big mistake to bash Bill Gates and praise Larry Ellison." Then there is the yachting rivalry. Plattner, like Ellison, is a serious sailor, but he has a terrible record against Ellison. He's never beat him, and three times when racing Ellison, Plattner's boat lost its mast. After one of those dismastings, in 1996, Plattner says the motorboat tending Ellison's yacht refused to stop and help, even though a member of Plattner's crew had been hurt. In protest, Plattner dropped his trousers and mooned the crew of the motorboat. Ellison says he knows nothing of that incident, but does recall getting an eyeful of Plattner's cheekiness the next year. In that episode, Ellison claims, Plattner was upset when Ellison refused to compete on the final day of a seven-day series because he had already clinched victory. Plattner brought his boat near the dock and dropped his trousers, mooning Ellison and his crew to protest what he saw as their bad sportsmanship. In either case, what's not in dispute is that the co-CEO of the fourth-largest software company in the world exposed his backside in the direction of the CEO of the second-largest software company in the world. Which is just not something you come across every day in intercorporate relations."