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

To: Steve Fancy who wrote (19150)	12/17/1997 3:10:00 PM
From: Joe Antol	Respond to of 42771

Steve: -- re: IBM (layoffs). I can assure you that you are reading.... this correctly. 2 mos. ago - "involuntary". As recent as last week - "voluntary" (i.e., you are either "eligible" or "not eligible" based on need) <BTW, I'm ineligible <g and sigh...>). Anyway, yeah, you're right, and the reasons are for just that --- "to continue to enhance shareholder value". The streamlining and consolidations are all being done for that reason. Make no mistake that LVG "does" in fact look at the share price daily (if not even more frequent). This is what "rubs" me about NOVL and how they de-emphasize their concern for the people (includes their own employees, right?), who have invested in them. Well, off my soapbox again. Sorry to waste bandwidth with nothing to contribute. Regards, Joe...<disclaimer: My opinions are my own, only!>

To: Steve Fancy who wrote (19150)	12/18/1997 2:55:00 AM
From: Lawrence Petkus	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 42771

Hi Steve, Moab when? I seem to remember that claim about internet leader in one year. Can somebody help me out? I could have sworn Schmidt intially said that MOAB was going to be released by the first of the year and that product wasn't going to be delayed. Then I could have sworn someone at the exec suite said Moab was going to be released in the 1st quater of 1998. Today, The DJNews Retrieval service has an article that quotes Schmidt talking about MOAB, but the article states it will be out in June. Am I hallucinating? This is such a marketing information, product schedule duck soup that it's hard to figure what's going on. Are they actually setting up a smoke screen or are they just not telling the media what is going on? Man, if customers are getting this duck soup, they must be pretty confused to say the least. Does anyone have Slitz's e-mail address? Thanks Lawrence

To: Steve Fancy who wrote (19150)	12/19/1997 12:42:00 AM
From: Scott C. Lemon	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42771

Hello Steve, I was curious about a couple of statements here and wanted to see if you could clarify them. (Just want to be sure about the accuracy ...) > Everyone seems to put this undying faith into Eric Schmidt, yet I > think most of us know John Young and the BOD run the show. Can someone post the official list of BOD and their roles? I thought that I had read that there had been a significant change of roles, officially, along with BOD titles. I thought that Eric is is charge and that John Young had stepped back. Just curious about the exact, legal details. > Really sounds like nothing has changed...give up a lot of customers > to NT by not providing a Year 2000 patch for 3.11 and below (seems > they'd at least try and maintain the customer base rather than give > it away), I'm somewhat at a loss to understand this statement. I'm not sure that I understand what you are suggesting. As a shareholder I want Novell to make money. If a customer is using v3.11, they have not continued to upgrade their product and stay current. If they are not upgrading, then they paid us at one time for an operating system, which consists of code written almost 10 years ago. Do you understand the cost to Novell to support these old versions? That's why we innovate and re-write code and offer new versions. Are you suggesting free maintenance forever? If not, then you are suggesting that we should offer an upgrade path for them ... and we have. That's v3.2. If you want us to give this to them for free, then you do want free maintenance forever ... and as a shareholder I'm not sure that I agree with you. I have a couple of old DOS machines lying around ... do you think that Microsoft should give me a Year 2000 upgrade for these? I'm not holding my breath ... > reduce their presence at one of the world's largest computer trade > shows, Which ones? I want to address this with the people in charge. > Everything's great today and will be really great a year or two > from now, especially from their new offices in two states. Just > think, a lot of these execs must have two offices. Some maybe even > 3 or 4 due to multiple state campuses. I don't know of any that have more than two. And I only know of a couple that have two offices. I was in Chris Stone's office the other day and was happy to see that his office in Provo is actually smaller than mine! (Well ... I guess I was happy to see that it was a very practical office ... we all know that size doesn't matter.) ;-) > Seems I read recently that IBM is initiating another round of > layoffs, a continuing plan to streamline operations...What is > Novell doing to reduce expenses? Why building 2 new campuses of > course. I know that you seem frustrated, but do you really think this is an accurate representation of what is happening? You know that we are losing the leases on the buildings in San Jose. And you know that we own property in the Bay Area. Could you please propose how to more properly deal with the issue of where the San Jose employees should work? Are you suggesting that we rent new space? Commit to new leases? Continue to hold property, but pay someone else for space? Please elaborate. I will pursue this for you. As for the Utah campus, we are not building a new campus. We are closing the Orem campus and adding two new buildings (to the 6 that already exist) at the Provo campus. So this is a consolidation, not expansion. And as a shareholder of a software development company, I feel much better when development groups are brought closer together. > IMO, it will be quite a while before this stock see's much smart > money. There is a lot of skeptisim amongst the analysts and > investors, and for very good reason. I believe that this is changing ... > Don't forget that Dr Schmidt himself burned us all big time on two > pre-earnings announcements this year. The money or fund manager > really has no recent historical defense if this investment blows up > on them...very difficult to justify the purchase IMO. I'm not sure where Eric "burned" people ... I thought that he has stated over and over again about down and flat quarters. An analyst that I spoke with recently indicated that "News or no news doesn't matter ... accurate news is what counts." He felt upbeat. I'm not sure where Eric has been so far off ... but I'm probably wrong. > Remember also that Dr Schmidt has promised Novell to be an > internet/intranet leader one year from his hire...April 9 1998 I > believe. I'm watching. I guess that we'll see. I do understand the history since my orginal purchases and options were in 1986. I've held them through all of this. Over the last several years my retirement was cut drastically short and I'm not happy about it either ... but I feel that some of your comments are unclear, or not quite accurate. Maybe I'm a fool, but I see things changing ... > sf Scott C. Lemon