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Technology Stocks : Siebel Systems (SEBL) - strong buy? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Trader Dave who wrote (1487)	5/5/1998 10:46:00 AM
From: Melissa McAuliffe	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 6974

TD, I don't think that msft and lotus is an appropriate comparison. You are talking about shrink wrapped software for word processing, spreadsheets, etc. Low price...minimal cost to convert, etc The differences between DOS and Windows were major from a perspective of giving users control of their own pc's with an easy to use operating system. Also, if I am not mistaken you could easily take any spreadsheet, document, etc. and convert it into msft format automatically. You could learn word or excel in a matter of hours. And most users didn't know DOS in the first place so giving them something that was easy to use like Windows was a major step. So from the perspective of a conversion this is more in line with the "instantaneous" conversion that Kevin spoke about yesterday. I think companies like D&B might be a slightly better point of reference for purposes of discussing customer mindsets in this type of situation. I am completely aware that the merger there was ultimately a failure but it was not for any of the reasons that have been discussed here.