Frederick, I appreciate your intelligence and your critical analysis of my post. I think it is just that we differ in our approaches to Novell. I use proprietary models that I have developed over the years to guide me and to help me make a determination as to when to sell or cover an exposed position.
In a way, you are correct about me and Novell. Novell is simple, fun entertainment, in a macabre sort of way. But it is obvious to me that the company is failing due to an ancient disease--hubris. And I am fundamentally lazy, too, so when I see an easy investment, I take it. And being short Novell is the easiest investment in the world to make--writing naked calls, being short and covering selectively.
As for timing, if you review a posting a while back, I stated that I sold naked May 10 calls for about 1«. They are worth « today, and I should cover my position and lock in the profit, but, as you say, there is the entertainment factor and it will be fun to watch them expire worthless in May.
I am taking advantage of two factors: The decline of the NOS/NetWare and the decline of the bull market as the chickens from Asia come home to roost. Novell no longer commands the respect in the marketplace or in the mindplace. And this is probably the fundamental cause to our differing approaches to investing in Novell, as you see Novell as a turnaround situation.
FWIW, I have only heard of one successful turnaround of a software company-Oracle in 1990, and this is when Oracle fired all of its managers and 25% of its workforce and brought in Raymond Lane. Novell has not taken the steps that Oracle took early on, and Eric Schmidt, PhD, is no Raymond Lane, at least in my view.
For Novell to regain its prominence in mindshare, it would need to invest significantly in advertising and change its broken VAR sales model. It would require an investment of well over the cash that Novell has available to it. In fact, Novell would need to recapitalize itself, as, in fact, Novell is grossly undercapitalized for what it needs to accomplish.
About the Internet II, I wasn't aware that Novell was involved in its formation. It's nice that Novell has good shareholders, like yourself, to evangelize the company's technology.
BTW, what else is Novell developing? For the record, they developed and killed AppWare, bought and sold UnixWare, bought and gave away WordPerfect, developed and killed NEST, bought and gave away Tuxedo, and continue to be a one product company-NetWare (sure you can give me the standard line about Groupwise et al). Novell has a proven track record in self-destruction. Oh yeah, about Wolf Mountain, seems that the developers that wrote the code never bothered to document either the code, or the design specs. And they left.
Although you denigrate both me and my position, I wish you well in you and yours. That is the beauty of public forums as we can share perspectives and knowledge in meaningful, if differing, fashions.
AV
P.S. I think that you are misinformed about Novell's participation in Internet 2. When I searched for Internet 2 using Novell's search engine, I got a lot of hits about topics irrelevant to Internet 2.
I don't think that they are involved in this initiative. Probably waiting on the sidelines, and will follow in Cisco's footsteps.
When I went to Cisco's site and used its search engine, this is what I found: Internet 2, in close partnership with the federal government's "Next Generation Internet" initiative, will work with many leading universities to facilitate and coordinate networking development, deployment, operation and technology transfer. As the first Internet 2 Corporate Partner and leading provider of networking for today's Internet, Cisco intends to contribute goods and services worth more than $1 million during the lifetime of the project.
Why wasn't Novell the first and founding member of the Internet 2 initiative? Why has Cisco become the de facto leader in networking? And have you been following Cisco's efforts in pushing its next-generation NOS?
The world it is a changin'. ;-) |
