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

To: BP Ritchie who wrote (18806)	12/1/1997 1:26:00 PM
From: BP Ritchie	Respond to of 42771

CNBC Sqwak Box 11/26 Interview with Eric Schmidt, well I finally got to see it (the server 'dropped' the link) after about 10 attempts. I can understand Paul's comments about this interview much better now, it was probably one of the worst public performances by a CEO that I've seen for a long time. On balance this interview probably undercut investor confidence and might have contributed to this morning's short selling. I hope that the reason for this performance is just that he was very tired ... most of the time he comes across much better than he did in this interview. He sure did look like he felt 'ambushed' by the question about his own personal purchase of company shares ... and his response about 'being in the ring with MSFT' was much less than confidence building, possibly even some reason for concern. He certainly wasn't well prepared for this interview ... I think he can do much better and believe he would have if he had been properly prepared and could have anticipated those two questions (which the PR folks should have been able to do for him). Now, back to sales and trying to predict what they will do in 1998! I still think it will be a 'better' year than 1997 ... it seems that they have targeted some market opportunity that will probably show about 2X to 3X increase in revenue (with some increase in expense too), but for some reasons that I can't quite get out in the open they continue to ignore the biggest opportunities of all ... where I think the revenue potential is more in the 10X to 100X range, maybe that's where they intend to spend some of their 'acquistion' funds soon. I'm worried that the real problem is that they just don't have the right kind of culture to support genuine and substantial sales efforts ... they still seem to value technicians and engineers much more highly than sales personnel ... and nobody within the company appears to be focused on making even the easiest of sales to either SOHO businesses or Indviduals ... maybe their latest re-org (just 2 weeks ago) will show how they intend to actually make some sales soon?!?! .... Please! Otherwise, you guys are heading for a buyout sooner than you believe. There are lots of other companies that do know how to package and sell your technology, either get moving or get ready to get pushed out of the way.