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Technology Stocks : INPR - Inprise to Borland (BORL) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sam Scrutchins who wrote (2140)	2/4/1999 8:25:00 PM
From: TChai	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 5102

Sam, share buybacks, unless for legitimate reasons, mostly benefit traders at the expense of share holders. Case in point, look at the Asian currencies crisis of last year, if the fundamentals of your currency is not good, central bank intervention is akin to giving money to the traders. If a company has enough cash to back it up and has good fundamentals like Novell or IBM, then the buyback is credible. In the case of INPR, it's so ironic that not only they didn't have the cash, but the money came from the sale of Starfish. It's ironic because the money came from true visionary like PK. Granted that PK was lousy at managing large corporation, but he was and is a true visionary for having been there and done it twice. The trouble at Borland began when Delbert picked up the ball and ran with it for a chance of becoming the next visionary. Unfortunately, never having done it before, he fumbled, and the employees and share holders suffer for it. I'll never forget Delbert's interview with LAN Times around March of last year, when he confidently said that this company is a startup. I was stunned but didn't know what he meant, afterall, Borland was built on more than a decade of blood, sweat and tears. So he treated it as such with disastrous results. All I can say is, "Sir, visionaries start at the bottom. They don't demand million dollars salary. You ain't no Steven Jobs, and he only takes $1 a year." Yes, share buybacks are window dressing in this situation. It's like putting a couple of bandages on a twelve inches cut. It was good news for share holders but was even better news for traders. How else can you be guarantee a floor price for your positions, knowing that the company will come in to support it? And basically they know the ceiling because that's the price point where they would go short. Don't take my word for it, look at the chart yourself. They know at what price the company would come in, that's where they would buy, let the shares run up then sell. You can see this in the chart, first bounce due to the buyback at 7, and subsequently at 5 since September. Buy at 5, then go short at 6 to 6 1/2. Thank you very much. Share buybacks make good PR for covering the screw up you made. It pleases the share holders. See! look at me, I'm doing something. Never mind that my action as a visionary wannabe got the company in the hole in the first place. The truth is if it wasn't for the fruit of the labor from a true visionary like PK, there'd be no share buybacks because there would be no money, and the traders know that. Instead of using that windfall money to create new products such as Delphi for Linux which will bring in more revenue and bolster the Windows version. The company has no Linux strategy. That money is almost gone and all the proverbial eggs are in one enterprise basket. If and when they accommodate small developers by creating cross-platform Delphi and JBuilder then the stock will take off. Until then it has one of the ugliest chart pattern for this once-in-a-lifetime bull market.