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Technology Stocks : Computer Associates -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Box-By-The-Riviera™ who wrote (2831)	8/2/1998 10:53:00 PM
From: Peter Eicher	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 5232

Hey Joel, Thanks for the kind words. And while I do gloat over this, it's really only taking joy at seeing pompous oafs like Chuckie and Sanjay get knocked down a peg. I do NOT gloat at the fact that normal, small investors lost money here. I certainly can feel for them, having made a few bonehead investments in my own day. Any wayyou slice it, it sucks losing money. Back to point. It's very hard to figure CA right now. Normally, when facing revenue slowdowns, they'd go buy a company and buy some revenue growth. But if they do that NOW (short term), what happens? The stock drops another ten bucks? Or does the street see it as "good old CA, back to buying revenue," and up the stock? I think the service bug-a-boo is coming home to roost, also. What has CA done since the CSC debacle? They promised more, but smaller, acqusitions were in the works. Where are they? Nothing has happened. Nothing. Why? I think it may be because each time CA approaches a services company, the company tells them that half the staff will walk if CA comes in. Because their reputation in the industry is SO bad (despite occasional protests from CA buffs on this board, it happens to be the truth), they may not be ABLE to successfully buy a services division. Meanwhile, I think IBM and Platinum Tech are really starting to cut into Unicenter sales, and certainly putting pressure on pricing. HP OpenView, as well, has been given new life recently. I don't understand the services thing at all. Where the hell was CA? Anybody could have seen the software/services trend coming three years ago. Was it a huge strategic blunder on their part? Or maybe arrogance that they didn't need to go that route? THey seemed to have been so badly blindsided. Were they so wrapped up in their classic "buy and burn" mentality that they couldn't see beyond it? Rumors abound of massive employee defections, even at high levels. Certainly, I know vast numbers of Cheyenne employees have walked. Some of the Cheyenne products are effectively dead now. And IS the accounting story "out of the closet"? Maybe the closet has only begun to open. You know, for years people have been wondering when CA's own arrogance and hubris would catch up with it. Is that time now? Are they the next Novell, or Cabletron, or DEC? A company that goes down and stays down, for years and years? Who the hell would ever buy them out to save them if that happened? IBM couldn't -- would never pass gov't muster -- and who else would? Microsoft? Nope. Wouldn't pass either. Oracle? Maybe. But they've been down on their luck too. So, there are lots of tea leaves around to read, but none are definitive. A pretty scary picture right now, though, from many points of view. Well, I hope to go to the shareholder meeting on the 12th (I think). Will report back here on it if anything interesting happens. Hope you didn't lose a lot on CA. You're a good guy.