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

To: BP Ritchie who wrote (18836)	12/2/1997 8:28:00 AM
From: Frederick Smart	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42771

BP Ritchie: Thanks for the support and feedback. You write: >My concerns remain though ... do the potential buyers know? ... seems like they don't! That's a simple problem to fix, Novell doesn't seem to be working of fixing it either! ... Oh, and one more difficult item ...what Novell products can the average PC user buy that will enable participation in this amazing developing Network of riches? ... Where can these products be bought?> The upcoming explosion of Java-based web-centric applications will be truly unbelievable. A huge shift is underway. Many, if not all paths will lead right through Novell. Schmidt sees this and is there to lead, educate, build faith and confidence in the developing landscape of this big picture - but granted a good MS-style kick in the A__ would go a long way. >MSFT doesn't have any products that are capable of delivering most of the benefits people are being lead to expect from this amazing new opportunity ... doesn't seem to stop them from advertising that they do ... ever heard 'Where do you want to go today?'> MSFT has never led anything. They are a bunch of pirates - did I say thieves- that simply do extremely well by hiring very talented engineers and software developers who are great at creating patch-code that just sqeaks by. Patch-code works fine in a local-client world. It is and will continue to get blown away in the coming open Networking world we are all going to be plugging into. >MSFT is selling people what they want to buy today ... then trying to make it work later. Novell is trying figure out what people should buy, building it today and expecting people to understand the difference, save their money now and wait until they can buy Novell's products ... I don't think this approach is nearly as effective as MSFT's practice.> Agreed. >All that Novell has to do is to 'educate' prospective customers, get their commitments early (take the money before they give it to MSFT) and then keep their (most of) promises ... easy to say, sometimes hard to do.> With Moab beta looking good and the many new/free migration tools they've been throwing into the mix, I think they are making progress in this area. >But the essence of the effort is usually called 'Marketing' ... the folks at Novell behave as if they think that a Marketing assignment is punishment for engineers that mess up.> The BIG issue is Novell's "mindset" - which reflects into the public world as "mindshare". Schmidt's #1 objective is to rebuild the mindset and mindshare. I think he's doing an admirable job. This guy is a customer-focused travelling fanatic. He's got the "vision thing" down better than most and I think this is having a huge impact turning things around overall. That's all I have time for - I swore I'd be taking a breather from this posting stuff for awhile - "Joe, how did you ever maintain the energy to keep it up??!" Good luck!