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

To: Adrian Slade who wrote (18991)	12/9/1997 10:50:00 PM
From: Paul Fiondella	Respond to of 42771

Pre Internet Show Comments --- Looks like I get there Thurs or Fri You've heard Schmidt's comments about using the 1Billion for acquisitions. Now its pretty clear that NOVL cannot do applications (remember the Wordperfect debacle). IT is also pretty clear that Schmidt is interested in buying something. He says some company/product that uses the Novell channel. Now look at what product will use the NOVL channel to gain sales first and is the best candidate to test Schmidt's rationale---its Novonyx's web server. This is almost a pure channel play to NOVL existing customers. I would therefore recommend that NOVL use NOVONYX as the model and figure out how these web server sales will/are being made. See if you can find a way to sell NOS servers to NSCP web server clients running NT. Try all of the partnering out with a closely held company before taking a major chance on building growth through acquisition. Its this sort of marketing/sales run that has to be tried first. Then I would suggest that Novell get somebody in there to advise them from a PC background. MSFT succeeded because it didn't have to develop applications---merely provide the best platform for others to. That is the kind of partnering Novell should be after. Encourage developers to build products on top of MOAB. Lure them with Novell's channel and customers applications needs. Then the question of acquisition will be simple. You just pick the company that learned the most and sold the most and you buy them early. And you will be able to because they run on your NOS and sell through your channel. =========================== Study how MSFT did it with DOS and then Windows. See if you can do it with MOAB and JAVA.