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Technology Stocks : Citrix Systems (CTXS) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: swisstrader who wrote (8397)	6/13/2000 9:24:00 AM
From: JMD	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 9068

swisstrader, "3 day rule all done", curious. What's the origin of the saying? What does it mean? If one can afford to be philosophical at this point ( and frankly, philosophy is probably all any of us can afford), I'd say that this is a company that fell flat on its face transitioning to the big leagues. They have negative ability to deal with Wall Street, much less the little people investors--their IR department is simply bush league. Their CFO bailing out for 'personal reasons' prior to announcing a miss of this magnitude a few days later will NEVER be forgotten by the Street--this guy is (or should be) history if CTXS is going to begin the repair job and my oh my what a long effort that will be. The sales and marketing 'division', as Mike Buckley has so correctly pointed out, was totally unprepared for the Fortune 500 enterprise class of customer. I'm sorry folks, DSOs and ARs don't go up like that SOLELY because the big boys take longer to make a decision and extract tougher payment terms. Both are true, but the CTXS sales team just got leveled, which means that it is in for major rebuilding and recruiting of a whole new class of marketing reps, not an easy task and, again, not a short term task. Which leads to the CEO, on whose desk the buck is alleged to stop. Is he capable of turning this thing around or is he responsible for it being where it is? This just became a very long term hold, which seems justified only because the technology still appears to be first in class and the segment hotter than a pistol. If either of those changed, the game would no longer be worth the candle. As it is, management mistakes have denigrated the technology but let us hope, not irreparably. For me the lesson is management, management, management. There is NO magic tech that bad management can't screw up. I jumped on Friday adding to a long term position, because it just didn't seem possible that the CFO and transition story could add up to this bad of a conclusion. Buying in the face of that volume has to count as one, but only one, of my more idiotic moves. I will now wait to see what action the CTXS board of directors takes on behalf of the shareholders. IMO, that will be far more predictive of recovery than anything that comes out of the engineering labs, at least for the next year or so. Mike Doyle