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

To: Paul Fiondella who wrote (19291)	12/30/1997 11:44:00 AM
From: Scott C. Lemon	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42771

Hello Paul, Just a couple of tidbits to add to the perceptions ... don't know if these will help or not. > NOVL and SALES > > What I don't see at this company is any understanding of how > serious their situation is. I read Sun as trying to move in on > NOVL's best product ideas with more muscle. I should have responded to the post about Sun's annoucement of their caching server ... I thought someone else had. But I wanted to add some points. The original ideas for Internet caching seemed to revolve around two university projects - Harvest and Squid. Most people have ported this software to their platform and are trying to sell it. This is what Sun, Netscape, and people like Network Appliance (NetCache) have been doing ... and they are paying for it with poor performance. Novell simply took these ideas and did a complete rewrite optimized for the NetWare platform ... which is perfectly suited for high performance I/O and caching. So Sun didn't exactly "move in" ... we're all working to go after the same space. > I see IBM carpeting the JAVA low end server market wall to wall > with products and having a much more dynamic strategy in that > area. I would agree that IBM is doing an impressive job in this market. They see the value for customers, and the benefits for themselves, in making Java happen. I keep wondering how many of the people burned by the OS/2 vs. Windows war are still around at IBM? They must really love to see this strategy moving forward ... ;-) > I look at Novell and I see a company without a strategy. And not > just without a strategy for a month or a quarter but for years > past. I would agree completely that the "strategy" in the past has been a bunch of people jumping at press headlines and thinking that they ruled the world. Companies (and people) seem to get big headed after some continued success and if they aren't slapped down they don't learn. My favorite movie about this is Big with Tom Hanks. Novell appeared to become split internally between those who knew, and those who thought they knew ... and those who thought they knew were in charge! I don't believe in this industry that you can pick a target too far out and state "We are going to go there!" I think that a company needs to look around and carefully analyze where the industry is, and what "general" direction things are moving in. They then need to start defining the future, complete with benefits, and start moving there ... with constant corrections to make everybody think you knew where you would end up! ;-) This is what Microsoft has done, and how they have been so successful. Anyone ever see Cairo? But boy was it a good story ... awesome marketing. > Yet you see nothing changing at the top. Same brain dead BOD. > Schmidt as the front guy holding off the Wall Street crowd with his > credibility. I know that in the past I have commented on my beliefs about change at Novell. With each change in management I have really seen that it "sucked less" than the last management. I listened to the words of the last few (Marengi, Gibson) and truely believed that they were going to accomplish what they said. But I have to say that overall they "sucked less" than the former management. Many things were accomplished, but numerous were left undone ... maybe it was just too much of a mess. But Eric has come in and started to make change. It might take some time to externalize (and I know that doesn't make shareholders happy) but there is some real "gutting" going on and there is communication! Imagine that in the last year and a half I only heard from management maybe once ... until Eric. I have now been to four or five company meetings since Eric has joined us ... all designed to set vision, discuss the company situation, and take live questions about anything! I know that what you see is the name for Wall Street, but I also see someone building a team, with confidence, and organizing the troops. > You would think by now they would have some strategy in place for > checking out how well Novonyx can do and piggybacking NOS sales on > that. I don't see any sales effort out there at all. This is starting. There were some preliminary seminars that occurred around the country, but the products just started to ship and be available last week. Most customers were not as interesting in things until there was shipping code ... now there is! > Does anybody? Selling or marketing? ;-) (Sorry ... I'm too close to the sales and too busy to say that I'm not selling ...) But, we are about to roll out TechShare again ... the "mini-Brainshare" technical and educational summit. You can find out more at: novell.com And I will say that since NDS for NT got announced our requests for field briefings have gone through the ceiling ... I'm not happy about this since I'll spend much of January and February on airplanes! Scott C. Lemon

To: Paul Fiondella who wrote (19291)	12/30/1997 11:57:00 AM
From: E_K_S	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42771

Hi Paul - The Java Virtural machine... What is the industry bench mark for determining the "best" JVM. Sun will be announcing a JVM for a low end product code named DARWIN (on January 13, 1998 according to Ed Zanders). Novell is also working on a JVM OS type product. I suspect that IBM has their own JVM product too. Is their an industry standard bench mark that measures performance of these JVM machines and what components do they measure to determine the "overall" best product. How does the Novell product stand up to these other JVM products? I would think that a PCI JVM card might be the best solution similiar to what the accelerator video cards do. Have you seen anything recently in the press regarding JVM performance standards? Open_GL seems to be one standard approach for multi-platform graphics (http://www.sgi.com/Technology/openGL/opc_proposal.html). Is their something similar for JVM? Happy New Year to all. Cheers.. EKS