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

To: Frederick Smart who wrote (25418)	2/11/1999 11:40:00 PM
From: Paul Fiondella	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 42771

Here is what has to change in the Street's mentality toward NOVL An awful lot of disappointed firms that held NOVL through the horrors and were burned by the company in the old days have yet to have those wounds healed. Basically they all see Novell as just another network operating system company in a world in which Microsoft is THE operating system company period. What will change this mentality is when they begin to understand that the internet world is one of specialized servers. So for example most of them have figured out the SunW is doing so well because it sell "web servers" in vast quantities. And that was news to the Street because they thought with Intel and Microsoft as the enemy SUnw was bound to fail. SunW went out and just developed a new market for itself as an internet infrastructure company --- in a place where MSFT and IBM couldn't compete. The street woke up to this when they realized there was an internet market that was different from the market for other computers. Now the Street understands SunW a little better. The Street also understands Internet Stocks --- as in look at all that money being made out there on them. They also understand portals, ecommerce, ISP's and various other internet developing markets and the hype that surrounds the real money being made in this internet market off of stocks. They also notice that we are usually ahead of them. Who bought internet stocks first? The Street ---nope, the people here? Yes. The problem is that the Street doesn't understand that Novell isn't a company in competition with Microsoft in the old network operating system market of the early nineties. Novell is a company on the virge of finding and developing the first internet applications that use a technology --- directory services --- formerly thought to only be useful internally to large corporations. When the Street finds out that Novell is taking this technology to the internet to enable a new and more secure level of ecommerce and when they look to find Novell's competitors on the internet and find out there aren't any, then they will perhaps understand what Novell is about to do. It is almost like when Apple computers with Visicalc appeared in corporate offices. (Look we can do spreadsheets on the equivalent of a calculator.) With Novell it is look we can do secure ecommerce and we know we are going to get paid on the internet. Is there a corporation out there that wouldn't want to turn the internet into a vehicle of secure commercial transactions? Novell has the technology and they have it now. Moreover with Digital Me, Novell has the technology to give every potential customer of every business a real digital identity --- one that is as good as that customer's bank account balance at the moment of the ecommerce transaction. (No more credit apps! and hoping to get paid. No more floating your customers with 30 days of credit. And no more worrying about whether to ship that $1000 item to some address based upon some data someone entered into your system from out there in cyberspace. now you know the person is real.) When the Street figures out that Novell isn't in competition with Microsoft anymore just the way they figured out that SunW wasn't in competition with Intel thanks to a new market called internet infrastructure, then this stock is going through the roof.