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

To: E_K_S who wrote (25111)	1/24/1999 10:08:00 PM
From: Paul Fiondella	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42771

Digital Me (even more!) The following appeared in Barron's roundtable. The fellow making the comments is a successful investor in internet stocks from the mainstream investment community. "It is clear what happened last year, which is that everybody figured out that the Internet was not a media model, it's an E-commerce model. That it wasn't about advertising, it was about doing transactions over the 'Net. So when they figured that out, they just bought Amazon.com. Every single day. The amount of venture capital that has been raised in this area is staggering." So the internet is about "doing transactions over the Net". Amazon APPEARS to the investment community as having a handle on how to do transactions over the internet successfully. They invest in AMZN not because it sells books but because it transacts commerce successfully over the internet. Now what is the key to successfully transacting over the internet? Let me give you a personal example. I ordered a printer from a company over the internet---an $800 transaction. They wanted all of my credit card, address info and they asked for one or two additonal pieces of security information. They promised next day shipment free. Next day nothing arrived! When I checked my voicemail I found someone from a service employed by the vendor had CALLED me to see if I was for real. So in this instance despite my giving them all of the information they would get if I appeared in the store and then some they were not about to ship valuable goods without personally contacting me. That destroys the internet model of commerce. And the more companies that do that to protect themselves the less attractive ecommerce becomes. (How much info are you willing to disclose to somebody over the telephone to convince them that you are you? I hung up.) That is the reason why you need a secure digital identity stored in a network vault. A real person, with a real plastic card is still trusted more than a virtual person logging on to a vendor site. The costs of maintaining sufficient security at each and every vendor site to "know the customer" are prohibitive in the end and will become more so in time. The mere disclosure of identity information to each and every vendor makes that information less and less secure and more publicly available. This is the Achilles heal of ecommerce. RESCUE ME NOVELL!!! If Novell grasps this problem and understands what the Barron's investor is saying about WHY HE BUYS AMAZON, then Novell will take its directory product and hit a home run with it before Microsoft and others even get a swing at the ball. And if Novell doesn't grasp where NDS fits into Internet commerce they are going to miss the real use of NDS just like they missed making their NOS an internet standard by not embracing IP when they had a dominant NOS market share in 1993. Know any Digital Me Novell execs. Time to email them about what we are discussing. =================== Most definitely having a secure smart card with your fingerprint is another important component of having a secure internet identity stored in an online repository (vault). The card then protects you by controlling who can transmit your encrypted id number to the vault on the network, thus who can initiate transactions as you. However the key to internet commerce (POST AMAZON) is what system the VENDOR feels will protect him against shipping products to people whose identities cannot be verified as the current systems used by Amazon etc. gets cracked. =================== You really have pointed to another important part of all this by showing that probably building out on the work of Activcard in a demo of Digital ME is the way for Novell to go with this.