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

To: Paul Fiondella who wrote (26543)	4/7/1999 3:06:00 PM
From: Spartex	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42771

What trends do see creating investment opportunities in the Internet arena? Franco: One thing I'm finding more and more attractive is this model of a commerce network as opposed to just a pure online retailer. An example is Digital River (DRIV). Its business model is to go to software publishers and sign them up to distribute their titles, and then go to online retailers and sign them up to sell the software products. So Digital River is functioning as a software distributor in the online world, giving software publishers much broader distribution than they would have in the physical world, and giving retailers a whole library of software titles as opposed to the dozen or so you typically find on the shelves at CompUSA, plus the ability to download this stuff online. The idea of a commerce network is that the more points you add to the network the more valuable the whole network becomes. The more software publishers Digital River signs up the more attractive they are for an Internet retailer who wants to sell software, as they've got this enormous library that they can offer from day one, rather than having to go and sign up all the software publishers themselves. This sounds like what some of the new online auto sites are doing, serving as a middleman between consumers and auto dealers. Franco: Right. With Autobytel (ABTL), the more consumers they sign up the more attractive it is for dealers, and the more dealers they sign up the better geographic coverage they have and the more attractive it is for consumers. So it kind of feeds on itself. cbs.marketwatch.com ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Isn't Novell's I-chain concept something that would do exactly what Digital River is doing, but without the grunt/manual effort? Very interesting to hear about companies like this, and software that could put them out of business. QuadK