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Technology Stocks : INPR - Inprise to Borland (BORL) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Karen Boucher who wrote (645)	7/24/1998 11:33:00 AM
From: Cube	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 5102

Karen, I appreciate your tech knowledge of INPR. The reason the stock is not performing is that the current CEO is not prioritizing the stock price. The float (shares outstanding minus shares held by management) has doubled in the last month, thus diluting the value of the company and the earnings per share. When a company thinks of its stock as a printing press for the top executives, the share price suffers. Contrast this with MSFT, where all the stock options given to the top execs is repurchased in the open market so that the float has remained the same for all these years. Yocam has just announced a stock repurchase plan, and that may definitely help. But it may take some time for investors to believe that Del is really serious about the stock and the shareholder. Cube

To: Karen Boucher who wrote (645)	7/24/1998 12:18:00 PM
From: Dave Zajac	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 5102

In its article picking InPrise for its Editors' Choice award in Application Development, Software Magazine states "But as the company continues to increase its focus on corporate developers, it will have to walk a fine line to avoid alienating its loyal base of independent programers who stuck with the company through bad times." Del stated in his conference call that desktop sales decreased faster than anticipated. The thread titled "It's official: Del has abandoned us" found on the company's news://forums.inprise.com/borland.public.delphi.non-technical newsgroup may be a clue to why EPS and subsequently share price is lower than it might otherwise be. It would appear that InPrise may be squeezing its customers into choosing Enterprise tools even though the customer is not developing Distributed Object applications. In the long run you can't win, if you try to do it at your customer's expense. David Zajac

To: Karen Boucher who wrote (645)	7/24/1998 9:35:00 PM
From: David Miller	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 5102

Hi Karen, a question if I may: Their unique ability to make these "universal middleware" products easy to use.....only MS and InPrise are able to truly provide ease of development Could you elaborate a little please? What is different in the MS/Inprise approach that actually makes it easy to use? Without some backing these kind of phrases just look like tired marketing blurb. One of the problems I believe the company has is its inability to articulate their market position in anything other than these kind of platitudes. It might help them if you were able to describe their advantages a little more clearly. david