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

To: Spartex who wrote (23969)	10/15/1998 5:33:00 PM
From: ToySoldier	Respond to of 42771

Quad, I tried to register but the password never showed up. Please post for me. Thanks! This Jim Perkins obviously has a MSFT slant and does not even know much about NT much less Novell products. First of all, he does not have an understanding what enterprise capable is. He can throw examples of who has installed an NT server in their environment but the industry analysts have proven and stated time and again that NT is not enterprise-class software. In stead of throwing examples around, he should have provided his reasons why he (among only a few in the industry) believes that technically NT is enterprise capable software. With a big enough hammer one can force a round peg in a square hole but that does not make it a good fit. The same holds true for NT being considered as Enterprise Capable. Because a company was able to get NT to run in their environment, it does not mean that it is by any means efficient, highly available, and flexible to the extreme demands of a large scale network. The majority of the industry disagrees with Mr. Perkins and I would like to hear his reasons. As for NT being cross platform. I think Mr. Perkins better take an NT refresher course. With the excpetion of Intel and Alpha, all the other platforms that Mr. Perkins mentioned have dropped support for NT. I should know since I work for one of the companies that owns one of the other platforms which NT is not supporting. NT is therefor cross-platform on only 2 hardware platforms (I would hope he is not grasping for straws by including old NT code that is not supported in the industry anymore). Although the NetWare kernal is only found on the Intel platform, its file and print services are cross-platform on MVS, Linux, VMS, and a few other ports. The NDS is now ported or being ported on 90% of the Unix OS's, NT, and MVS, as well as a few other smaller market-share platforms. NT is not even in the same ballpark as Novell in these arenas. Finally, Mr. Perkin's last response to me on downplaying the NT limitations compared to NetWare shows his lack of involvement in large scale operations. No enterprise IT professional would call these minimal limitation for an OS. One can't PLAN for an unexpected outage or IMACs that require changes to the OS environment while still maintaining up-time. If one operates in a mom-and-pop 9-5 monday-thru-friday only operation then NT is a great solution, but these limitations dont cut the mustard for 7x24 operations where every little outage is costly to the company's bottom line. I get the feeling that Mr. Perkins has not worked intimately in large-scale enterprise environments because many of his statements would be deemed unacceptable in the enviornments I have do deal with daily! As for getting into this battle of the NOS's, Mr. Perkin's initial comments started the battle. It couldnt go unchallenged. I also have read many of the other posts on this board and it is quite clear that many of these so-call Experts do have a good concept on Novell's direction in the industry. Otherwise they would have included discussions about NDS and many of the other network infrastructure products that Novell is putting more emphasis on. In fact, Novell officials even stated publically that NetWare is important, but NDS is the key! So maybe we should all get some of our facts straight before hammering the nails into the coffin of Novell. Otherwise many of you will be missing out on a potentially big come-back winner in the industry. Toy

To: Spartex who wrote (23969)	10/16/1998 12:13:00 AM
From: Marc Newman	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42771

How about some OT market commentary from our roving correspondents like Paul, Dwight, and Don? I miss 'em. Seems to me that companies will be trading on their own merits for at least a week as the Fed is now on the market's side and earnings so far have been coming in pretty much as expected. On the tech side, Microsoft reports Tuesday and that will likely help the Nasdaq hold up. Nice move for NOVL the past two days. Sorry I missed it. Quad, nice to see you on the AAPL thread. Marc