Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

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

To: khacha who wrote (4511)	3/4/2001 2:17:25 PM
From: Hardly B. Solipsist	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 6974

The problems that ORCL had might not apply to other companies (we should know for sure in about a month), but they told a very specific story in their CC. So either they are lying in a very specific way or they really weren't failing to execute. I know that a lot of people don't trust LE, but as far as I can tell I know the difference between his smoke-blowing and when he's telling the truth (I always thought that his statements about burying SEBL were laughable, for instance), and I bought the story. The other point is that I know of no cases where Henley has been untruthful, and I've seen a number of cases where he's "corrected" statements by Larry (or shut him up to keep him from putting his foot in things), and Henley was the one that was the most specific on the CC about when and how the deals got deferred. (He did interrupt Larry at the very end to keep LE from commenting about the pipeline, but at no other time during the CC.) ORCL lies all the time in their press releases, just like almost every other company, but they do it reasonably competently -- that is, you have to actually know something to understand why what they've said is technically defensible and still completely misleading. An experienced liar probably won't say something like "Deals were closing as usual for the quarter until the last week and then for a significant fraction of companies all of the big-for-that-company deals died on the CEO's desk", when the problem is completely different from that -- they'll just try to give you the impression that this is what happened without saying it. So if you are taking solace in SAP and MANU, remember that things apparently looked fine at ORCL until the last week of the quarter. Some people on this thread seem to want to see ORCL as a losing company because of LE's comments about SEBL, but ORCL is pretty well-run, and LE is far less erratic than casual attendance to his public statements would indicate. That said, unless the 92 interchange falls into the SEBL HQ, I think that ORCL will be lucky to come in a distant second in the CRM market. (But Ray Lane's departure wasn't a big loss.)