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

To: Alphonse Viazzo who wrote (18620)	11/22/1997 5:21:00 AM
From: Don Earl	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42771

Hi Alphonse, In spite of my current very negative attitude toward Novell, MOAB has been hyped enough to get attention when it is released, especially if the beta is noteworthy, which we probably won't see much news on for a few weeks. If nothing else Schmidt does seem to have the technical prowess to get the products out the door in a timely fashion, very probably before your May target date. From what I can tell, it will probably beat NT 5.0 to market by six months. If anyone in the company is bright enough to talk the BOD into letting them launch the product with a $30 million saturation ad campaigne, they could very well blow revenue and stock price into orbit. More than likely you'll see something in the WSJ that only investors will see, some stuff on the PR Newswire and some cautiously luke warm write ups in the pro Microsoft trade rags. There will also be some very wonderful articles that are so obscure that only the concerted efforts of everyone on the thread will ever bring them to see the light of day. The biggest risk to a short play that far out is that someone at Novell might get a clue and turn at least part of their marketing over to an outside agency that actually knows what it's doing. If they started pushing NDS for NT and Border Manager where it would do some good, and offered some kind of upgrade incentive to new Internet Ware customers with MOAB as bait (raise the price and call it free), they could very well get the price up enough that the May suckers rally would wipe you out. Especially if they managed a MOAB release before the end of the April quarter. It never hurts to keep an open mind in both directions when playing the stock market. The best time to sell is also the best time to short and the best time to cover is probably a buying opportunity. You might want to look for a chance to buy some real cheep calls in the near future, just in case. Regards, Don