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Technology Stocks : RATIONAL SOFTWARE- BUY OR HOLD -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: ratlong who wrote (2743)	12/16/1998 5:10:00 AM
From: Hans-Erik Eriksson	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 3115

ratlong, > The funniest thing is that these web companies don't have the > discipline or focus to use Rational tools. I think they will > eventually have to, but right now, it seems like many of them > are graphic artists, not engineers. I have actually worked on a larger Internet site project where we modeled the requirements and the design (both the internal system design and the design of the web site) with UML. Even invented some "Internet extensions" to UML so that all the links between web files could be modeled correctly. So it's definitely possible to do, but I agree that the Internet world currently uses the famous methodology of "happy hacking" rather than anything more sophisticated. > This board has dried up because we seem to be reiterating the > solid nature of this company. How about we start to try to > identify our risks. Anyone have anything to start with? The really big risk is always: people. And I'm afraid I got a Rational example: the swedish consulting company SoftLab was bought by Rational in March '97 for $9.5 million in cash. Just recently, ALL consultants have resigned (and are supposedly starting a new company of their own)... So something must have gone terribly wrong. This hasn't been publicly announced, but it is "all over town" - and it does affect the consulting and training capacity of Rational Sweden. Globally it shouldn't affect Rationals bottom line much, but it shows that there are risks involved with people. Best, /Hans-Erik