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Technology Stocks : BORL: Time to BUY! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: David Miller who wrote (9760)	4/5/1998 4:01:00 PM
From: TChai	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10836

Is your assumption here that Borland's stock price is used by their sales and marketing team to illustrate their progress towards becoming an enterprise tool company? David, Quite the contrary. I think that it's used by the customers in judging vendor viability, especially those managers who don't know anything about tools. I would guess that a typical attitude would be, if your company is doing so great (or have such great products) why the stock is in the basement? In a ComputerWorld survey, vendor stability is ranked #1 or #2, I don't recall, but it's up there. As an example, a lot of MS success is due to its stock prices, where success breeds success, sort of like a pyramid scheme. But that's another story. I find this difficult to correlate with Del Yocam's concentration on long-term strategy, technology acquisition, financial conservatism etc. If stock price were that important, he would surely be using very different tactics indeed. Sure, Mr. Yocam does all the long-term strategy stuff, but the stock price is also important to him. If you recall, he was very upset about that in the last conference call with analysts. And as someone on this thread pointed out, by changing the fiscal year to calender year, Borl would show up on the book as having a 'profitable year' three months sooner than otherwise. And that's important to Value Line, S&P stock guide, Yahoo, etc. readers. I'd say that the sly fox know what he's doing. There are still a few small technology gaps in the Borland story, particularly in their capability to cope with back-end legacy transaction systems - CICS, IMS 'n stuff. I don't possess knowledge about the IMS stuff, but that's why we need someone like you on this thread to educate us and challenge any assumptions that don't hold water. What Mr. Yocam brought to Borl is the discipline in terms of financial and product releases that they never have. They are at a point now that costs are under control and any slight tip in their favor goes toward their earnings. A break over 12 is the best advertisement they can get to help bring in a couple millions more in revenues (earnings) which breeds more success to the stock and so on.

To: David Miller who wrote (9760)	4/5/1998 4:38:00 PM
From: Timothy Wojnar	Respond to of 10836

David, you wrote: There are still a few small technology gaps in the Borland story, particularly in their capability to cope with back-end legacy transaction systems - CICS, IMS 'n stuff. Without this, they will tend to stay in the "new applications from scratch" arena, rather than follow the rest of the world into the "new applications that can easily and securely re-use legacy systems" space. Doesn't Visibroker ITS address this issue? They recently posted a white paper on their web site on it and mentioned some these issues. Or is it not to the level you feel they need? Tim