Found some interesting insights about 'net' business opportunities.
Most of this stuff sound like exactly what Eric Schmidt has been telling people for the last 6 months ... so, I would assume that Novell has the right product to 'own' a very large portion of this opportunity. But, notice that these 'scary smart' tech investors don't seem to have even heard of Novell ... another perspective on Novell's 'marketing' problem ... not even showing up on the 'right' radar screens. This problem seems extremely easy to remedy though!
URL1, inteviews with 'scary-smart' tech investors, their outlook:
pathfinder.com
URL2, some 'marketing' statements from or about Novell:
novell.com FastCache
Clips from URL1:
>December 29, 1997
The 1998 Fortune Investor's Guide
Fortune Picks the Brains of Four Scary-Smart Tech Investors
What's the next big software play? Are there net stocks worth owning? What about intel? Is the tech boom over? For answers, read on.
Andrew Serwer; John Doerr; Ron Elijah; Roger McNamee; Mary Meeker<
>Roger McNamee: We track an index of 600 technology stocks. On average they're down 37% from their 52-week high. This is not a dangerous time to be buying quality technology companies.
Ron Elijah: Look, we go through corrections. These are stocks that go down in corrections. They do have higher betas. Everything in my portfolio went down what it should have gone down. The Nasdaq dropped 16%, and my stocks are down 25% to 30%.<
>Mary Meeker: The rate of growth in some sectors has slowed. We had some earnings disappointments. We won't know about Asia for six months or so, but it seems as though demand continues to be pretty strong. Also, technology isn't monolithic--you can have weakness in certain pockets and not have weakness in others.
McNamee: That's right. Technology consists of literally dozens of segments. Every year certain tech stocks have done very well and others have done very poorly. What's going on in Asia will clearly affect some segments of technology, but to describe it as an industrywide problem is, in my mind, completely inappropriate.<
> Does Asia have you concerned, Ron?
Elijah: I went through fear and depression because I own quite a bit in the semiconductor and semiconductor capital-equipment areas, and they went down the most. But we called up the companies that are in our portfolio--they all say they don't see any downturn yet. Also, Asia is a manufacturing base for U.S. companies, and most of the product made there is exported. These businesses are in dollars, so in some ways U.S. companies are actually going to benefit because the local labor force just got cheaper.<
>Elijah: Yes, the equation has turned around. The Internet isn't happening because people are buying PCs. People are buying PCs because of the Net. I want to comment on Intel. It took me a long time to figure that company out, and it's actually very simple. Intel's not slowing down. It's just adjusting right now. Look ahead, and you can see that next year the company breaks free again.<
> Assuming Intel can handle this pipeline shrinkage, as you call it, do you think it can successfully negotiate its way through the new world of networking?
McNamee: That's the challenge Intel faces. I think it's doing a great job of positioning itself for the networking market. But you're talking about taking a business that's tens of billions in revenues and repositioning it--you don't do that by snapping your fingers. I think Intel's profitability will be lower in 1998 than it was in 1997, but Wall Street's expectations are coming down enough to compensate for that. And don't forget, this is one of the five greatest companies in our economy. <
>John, what trends in Internet stocks should we be paying attention to?
Doerr: We were talking about PCs earlier. I wanted to make a point about a larger trend I call TCs, or thin clients, which is profoundly affecting how people are using connected computers.
"Thin client" sounds like someone with a health-club membership. What does it mean?
Doerr: Thin clients are network applications that let your PC talk to your server. It means that all you do to make your PC work is use your Web browser. You don't have to install any other software. So instead of having a big hairball of software on a huge PC, people are using the Web browsers as the interface for all kinds of applications. I'd put my daughter's college funds in this trend. <
>But this wonderful TC industry won't really take off until the online world runs a little faster, will it?
McNamee: If you go back ten years, there wasn't enough hardware horsepower to run the software applications people were using. Now the thing that there isn't enough of is bandwidth.
Doerr: So now we've got 600- or 700-horsepower motors in all of our cars. Instead of running them around the race track, we're taking them out on little one-lane dirt roads. The highway--the bandwidth--is not there.<
BPR comment ... remember what Eric Schmidt said during the summer?
>>> The next 'killer app' is going to be bandwidth. <<<
>McNamee: When we used to think of the telecommunications industry, we were talking about voice. All the growth today is coming from data, so the new model of a telecommunications company is one that has a network optimized for data traffic. WorldCom has snuck up on the entire industry. If you go back through the chain, it started as UUNet getting acquired by MFS, which got acquired by WorldCom, which is now acquiring MCI. People forget that MCI is one of the key Internet backbone players.<
> McNamee: The people who are building the Internet have a gigantic business opportunity. The obvious leader is Cisco Systems, which is the dominant player in networking. Sun Microsystems is down a ton. I'm sorry, but this company is not going out of business. The stock is unbelievably cheap. You cannot build the Internet without Sun servers. 3Com is another stock that's down a ton. They're having a lot of inventory issues this quarter and people are terrified, but they are No. 2 in networking. They're not going away. We're huge fans of PMC-Sierra, which dominates a number of markets for the chips that you use to build networking devices. A recent IPO called Mmc Networks, which makes a different kind of networking chip. <
BPR comment ... now, this is troubling ... why didn't he mention Novell? ... Novell is the 'premier' Internet and Intranet software company right? ... it is in terms of current marketshare, it is in terms of technical capability of it products both installed and recent announcements, it is in terms of the technology it regularly demonstrates (FastCache, File Clustering), it is in terms of most of the Reliability/Manageability/Scalability measures. But, still these 'scary smart' tech investors don't seem to know about Novell ?!?!?!
*** I believe that someone in Novell's IR department has some work to do ASAP! ***
> Meeker: If you believe in the growth in the Internet, you have to own Cisco. <
BPR Comment ... A 'commodity 486 PC' with Novell Software could change the name from Cisco to Novell in this statement! If, Novell could figure out how to make sure that EVERYONE knew about it.
> McNamee: Over time, the smart companies reposition themselves. The job that Microsoft has done in the last two years of repositioning itself as an Internet play has been nothing short of miraculous. You never would have thought that was possible. <
BPR comment ... Aha! ... so the real problem with Novell is that nobody thinks that the repositioning that Novell is going through right now is possible!
Clippings from URL2:
> One BorderManager FastCache Web server accelerator on a single-processor Pentium system can deliver the equivalent performance of five T3 lines. <
> FastCache's acceleration is astonishing to everyone who sees it. And the numbers tell you why. FastCache's web acceleration is anywhere from 10 to 200 times faster than standard access methods. It has been tested at well over 4,000 hits per second and 250 million hits per day. <
BPR comment ... sounds like at least part of the cure for the 'bandwidth problem' to me. BTW a small 'snippet' of measurement data reported by Boardwatch magazine ... the Overall throughput of the Internet appears to be 'capped' at about 4 kbps average ... even on highspeed lines (probably because the 'nodes' can't pump out the packets fast enough) ... BorderManager installed at everyone of these nodes would improve the speed of the whole net by a factor of 10X or more immediately, seems to be a pretty easy sale to make! ... anyone at Novell actively working on this opportunity?
Well that's enough for one post. Amazing opportunity, Novell is idealy positioned to own the market ... I can't believe it hasn't turned into real money for us Novell stockholders yet!
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