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

To: TTOSBT who wrote (10361)	4/30/1998 10:14:00 AM
From: shane forbes	Respond to of 10836

Ouch. That's an evil thought. Strike us down before we even have a chance to get to the starting gate. One of the techies here can explain that or Del could as you suggest. Naively to me it seems that BORL at least has Entera to start with and has maybe a few quarters of a lead before the Great Satan of Software comes huffing and puffing. Most likely in the early stages this will be a race with several horses. I actually have thought of the possibility that BORL rises up like a Phoenix only to be squished again when MSFT decides to get ansy and nasty again. The difference here, unlike the days of the desktop, is that MSFT does not rule the enterpise. They will eventually but that is about 5-6 years away or so. The second thing is that I bet the enterprise is an area where scalability, robustness and all those other buzz-words become important. Cost may be somewhat secondary. This means MSFT starting a price war won't get them anywhere. BORL's catch-22 is that they need to establish trust in the minds of the CIO folksters. And that comes only with a few important big-name folks putting down the big bucks for BORL's tools. The VSGN merger gives them a lot of credibility here (guess) and a viable long term solution. Unlike the desktop and the days of Phillipe, hopefully this will prove to the area where BORL's technical expertise will not be thwarted by MSFT's price-wars. (And yes I know it is INPR...) Shane.

To: TTOSBT who wrote (10361)	4/30/1998 10:21:00 AM
From: David W. Taylor	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 10836

What about the other goof? Mixing a consulting business with product development can be a very bad thing. Good scenario: The consultants roar out there to install the stuff the developers create. The revenue from the consulting sustains the developers until the product starts to generate its own revenues. Bad scenario: The consultants roar out there and discover that the product is great on paper but sucks to implement. The revenues from the product don't materialize. The consultants start to resent the in-house developers for sucking up "their" money. Life sucks. I have been exactly there. A good consulting house that "went for the gold" and developed a product that could not be sold. This was the reason I sold in such a hurry yesterday. The name was the final straw. "Hi. I'm from InPrise...." "Who???" Any thoughts?

To: TTOSBT who wrote (10361)	4/30/1998 1:25:00 PM
From: David R	Respond to of 10836

RE: Or am I misunderstanding that MicroSoft is not a middleware competitor? MSFT does not have a strong enterprise offering yet. They are aggressively working to move to the enterprise. Their strategy consists of NT 5.0, Active Directory, MSMQ, DCOM + MTS (transaction server), SQL Server, Exchange, and Back Office. They have no plans to support any open standards. WHile this worked on the desktop (a market they already owned), I think that their strategy will not be successful in the enterprise. They are trying to sell against the market momentum, and they currently do not have a clear advantage. There are three areas that concern me, that seem to have been overlooked by many. First, MSFT NT will be the enterprise OS of choice in the next few years unless Sun really gets it together. More importantly, many have ignored the current success MSFT is having with Exchange. They have Notes, CC Mail, and Groupwise connectors, and displacing these products at an alarming rate. MSFT is working hard to scale Exchange. The 5.5 version is enterprise ready. Exchange 6.0 will scale to 10's of millions of users (they are targeting the ISP's as well as corporate). Also, From my own experience, I know that MSFT is working aggressively to make Exchange the best "Unified Messaging" post office ( a strong differentiator for email servers). The performance of Notes is pathetic, and MSFT could end up owning the email server market. Lastly, if MSFT is successful in deploying ActiveDirectory in NT 5.0, then they will also control the directory services market. Hmmm. OS, directory, and email server markets. If MSFT succeeds, then they will be in a position to exert substantial control over the enterprise.