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

To: Scott C. Lemon who wrote (22272)	5/24/1998 9:28:00 PM
From: Paul Fiondella	Respond to of 42771

Gates strategy (1) Start small and extend the familiar. Make sure the unsophisticated user can relate to the OS through a consistent easy to use GUI interface, make sure your products are mass market products that the consumer can relate to on the surface regardless of how they operate under the hood. Never give the user control over things like time slice priority, queuing, swapping etc. Hide all these details about performance behind a brand name. Windows. Let your opponent go after the techies. You go after management. (2) Take the familiar and scale it up. (3) In entering a market go after the opponents weakest link. In the case of Novell the application server at the departmental and small business server level. (4) Leverage the OS by adding products that appeal to your target audience. In the case of small business users make sure familiar apps work with the new OS and be sure you have familiar products like MICROSOFT OFFICE available. Produce flavors of the OS like Workstation NT so that what is on the desktop appears to be just like what is on the server. (5) Extend your NOS position by adding products that address typical end user server needs such as shared database access, sell these solutions as a package---BackOffice. (6) Add freebies like a web server and browser to address various emerging NOS markets. When they become mature and everyone is using your free product, you can charge. (7) If your opponent produces a better product for network support, announce yours will be better when it is released, threaten to withdraw service support from customers that go with the opponent's product in the meantime, and favor customers that commit to 100% MSFT with a better level of service. Throw in price deals and exclusive contract language when necessary. FUD the end user. Create fear of going with "legacy" products. Stress the main stream nature of MSFT. MSFt will always be around and always be a safe choice. Count on your opponent to do nothing about your unfair business practices. Apologize and be politie when their CEO calls. (8) Take advantage of hardware improvements to overcome your NOS scaleability weaknesses. Example support 64bit Merced. Stress that your partnership with Intel will result in raw hardware power being effectively translated via your OS into the performance that your customer needs. (9) Once you have made some headway in gaining a beachhead in the server market, tell your opponent that there is no need to try to go "head to head" in the area you control---application servers. Tell them you have no intention of attacking their stronghold---enterprise servers for a few years. Continue to give away web servers and try to control any extension of the network market. Continue to invest in network markets your opponents ignore. Cover all the bases your opponent doesn't: Ecommerce, web gateways, retail web products such as airline tickets autos etc., contracts with ISPs, and use your site as a gateway and your OS as a gateway to the Internet (click on the first screen icon). Lull your opponent with some temporary compromise until you can get closer to your goal of a scaleable server. Time is on your side. Remind your opponents that you control the desktop from time to time with a new desktop OS release. Make it difficult for their network client support to work effortlessly. ======================= To summarize: MSFT is a OS monopoly. It leveraged the desktop OS to control the desktop applications market. It leveraged the spplication market to control the small server market. It will now leverage the small server market to control the mid-size server market and the browser market to control the internet network market and so on and so forth.

To: Scott C. Lemon who wrote (22272)	5/26/1998 10:31:00 AM
From: Paul Fiondella	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42771

Why can't NOVL think like an applications company? "Leverage the OS by adding products that appeal to your target audience." Now some at Novell would say that we are doing that with NDS. See we have a directory we are adding nice easy to use tools to set it up (ZEN). Isn't that what we should be doing for our customers? Now if MSFT were in NOVL's shoes what would it do? In today's Washington Post there is an article about how companies are besieged by unwanted E-mail and Faxes that are spamming up their systems. The employees are spending too much time flushing E-mail, the good with the bad. Moreover they have to assign in some companies a person to look at all the FAXes to separate the junk from the important. If MSFT were Novell they would ask the simple question---is there anything the NOS can do for these customers? And then they would build it, sell it and tout it. How about Novell?

To: Scott C. Lemon who wrote (22272)	6/1/1998 12:01:00 PM
From: Paul Fiondella	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 42771

Nortel, Northern Telecom, and Norweb --- Where is Novell? My stove is my computer. It can have JAVA conversations over the power line with the web server. Sound too far fetched. Not for friends of mine in the power control engineering field who have been using networks and dial-up networks for decades to manage energy consumption at industrial plants remotely. Now we have a serious effort on the part of the Nortel in this area. They are looking to put a box on the power line capable of communicating with intelligent appliances in the home and remote servers and the Internet. Is Novell in the picture? I would love to go to an Internet site. Type in my password. Access my second home. Turn up the heat. Check the video security camera. Check the weather. Recieve Email from my failing appliances (such as my telephone answering machine knocked out by the power outage, that now needs to be reset. Etc. Etc. The key is "intelligent appliances" to cut the cost of adding little boxes to light switches etc. That means some standard. And then there needs to be a network. Is Novell in the picture? Incidentally Nortel wants to make the power lines coming into your house, the instant Internet access ramp to high speed data communications. Are Novell servers in the picture?