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

To: Joe Antol who wrote (18830)	12/2/1997 12:39:00 AM
From: BP Ritchie	Respond to of 42771

Well Joe, I've held this stock for more than 4 years now. I stuck by them and even tried to help personally, I've 'invested' at lot more than just money. I felt a lot better when it seemed to me that they finally faced up to their problems and took some actions to fix them this summer ... BTW, I think you personally deserve a lot of credit for helping it happen! I was pretty sure in February this year that the stock would fall, and still I hung in ... 'loyalty' I guess. But today I noticed that there were a lot more short sales of NOVL than usual, the Dow went up (a lot) most of the stocks I follow went up ... kind of like a 'rising tide' and yet Novell went lower (with lower than average volume). I replayed the Eric Schmidt interview ... kinda reminded me the time a few years ago when the various G7 Central Banks were arguing in public and the German guy basically said that he wouldn't support the British ... anyone with a decent spreadsheet program could figure out was was about to happen to currencies ... a guy named Soros did and had enough money to do something about it ... he made buckets of money simply because he realized these guys were effectively predicting their future actions. It seems to me that Eric Schmidt just told the 'shorts' ... you're OK for another couple of quarters, and BTW ... even I don't invest in this company that I'm running. Today it sure looked like the 'short sellers' heard the same message. So either he's setting up the shorts for some punishment, or he's really telling us that we're (us nut cases that really believe in Novell and stayed long) sheep ... and he's now got our fleece ... makes me kinda sad. They've got the best technology, some of the best technical people in the business and they don't even put up a serious effort to play in the game, much less try to win! I believed that they were getting organized, funded and prepared to put on a major sales campaign that should be starting right about now ... instead I heard "there's a few more transition quarters ahead of us" ... so when should we think he'll send his team out to play for real? ... looks like it might be a few minutes after the final whistle to me (at least now). I sure hope that I heard it wrong! But, it's still cheap ... can you imagine what Steve Ballmer or Bill Gates could do with Novell's market position and technology? ... Or Michael Dell, or Ray Lane, or Steve Jobs, or a bunch of people at Intel, or another bunch of people at IBM, or ... I know there are others too. I think of Chris Stone in that league, I don't really know as much about John Slitz & Eric Schmidt ... maybe they are too, but they sure didn't show me any evidence in the past few months, and today's market action was pretty convincing ... 'way poopy' (I think that's what Janice would call it). I feel like I've been pooped on, and I'm getting a bit tired of this feeling. BTW ... I just received a Novell Developer 'welcome kit' ... and let my MSDN subscription lapse. I'm expecting a copy of Moab in a couple of weeks ... we're starting to reconfigure computers again, and I think we'll have a Novell test bed up & running about New Years ... I'm pretty sure the software itself will be good, but I'm starting to get this bad feeling in the pit of my tummy ... wonder how many customers there will be to sell to? I might need to renew the MSDN subscription to avoid a future dependance on Rolaids?