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

To: Hans-Erik Eriksson who wrote (2744)	12/16/1998 8:36:00 AM
From: Thomas Haegin	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 3115

Hans, Ratlong, I agree key people are an important factor, especially with smaller cos. like RATL. The other big risk of course is that somebody else comes up with a better product or service than RATL. I get the feeling that the barriers of entry are rather high for this to occur and RATL seems to be the market leader in OO-software design tools. They also do well in integrating their various products, so being able to offer a "suite", which I think the market normally wants (like MS Office, for example). Let's hope they succeed to profit from the strongly rising demand (as projected by IDC et al.) to the fullest and stay flexible enough to cope with any changes in the marketplace. My hope would be that RATL will succeed to build a franchise in OO-tools as MSFT built in op sys and applications. However, I'm not yet sure if RATL is really a buy-and-hold-infinitely as MSFT would be for any long-term holder. Also let's not forget that revenues for RATL products are still rather small, at least for now. So all in all, I still like RATL very much, but I don't consider it "riskless" (as I would MSFT). Therefore I still can imagine to sell RATL some day, but not anytime soon. So far I'm very happy with what's happening at RATL. Thomas