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

To: Frederick Smart who wrote (23466)	8/12/1998 12:45:00 PM
From: Bearded One	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42771

45-50 mm lines of code vs. < 10mm (exact #?) I think the number for NT 5 is around 35-40 million, but that may include the "testing harness"-- all the debugging crap that will be removed. So give them some slack and say 30 million, 25 million of which is new code. As far as Novell's Netware 5, of that 10 million lines of code, only 2 million lines are new code. So the new code ratio is at least 25 million to 2 million, 12.5 to 1. WARNING: Severe Speculation Ahead! I've seen charts where doubling the lines of code on large projects adds 30% to the time it takes to create under completely optimal conditions (best programmers, great managers, no changes in product in the middle, etc... If you figure 2 million lines of code takes 2 years, you can do a little math and figure that it has to take at least 5 years to do 25 million lines of code. Assuming they started on the new code for NT 5 in January 1996, that would put them in 2001 for a stable release, which is what Gartner predicts. Of course, conditions are far from optimal-- adding code is harder than starting from scratch, when you have such a big project the average quality of programmers and managers goes down, systems programming is the hardest form of programming, they have a lot of outside marketing pressure, etc... Basically, I think Novell has a huge lead that people are only starting to realize.