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

To: TTOSBT who wrote (2616)	4/11/1999 12:03:00 AM
From: Kashish King	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 5102

Public relations freebies don't amount to a hill of beans and that's what you're in here touting. Posting public relations PR won't convince anybody of anything. You are in the wrong place if you think frothing at the mouth is going to sway anybody's opinion. You haven't explained how you interpreted a simple statement about the completion of a share buy-back as an announcement that it was just starting. You have no credibility and no facts, just a lot of hooting and hollering. As for the tolling of the Inprise death Knell, I didn't invent that quote but I happen to agree with it. Inprise is history, period, and the sooner you wake up to that the better you'll feel. That does not mean the company can't be sold for more than the current street value but there's no guarantee that will happen either. FYI, last week I bought INPR at 2.875 and flipped it at 3.375, then I bought IONA at 13.75 and dumped it at 14.00 -- 8000 and 4000 shares respectively. So I'm obviously not averse to a vegas-style flip of this loser and that is what you ought to be doing instead of hooting and hollering on the way down like Slim Pickin's riding the Bomb. I started investing instead of trading over a year ago and it's paid off, but sometimes you can't resist. Have fun Monday, everybody is going to get whacked but then I'm already up a heckuva lot. YEEEEEE HAAAAAAWWWWW! Next flip target: AMD if it tanks Big Time as I suspect it might. CPQ is a loser, I won't touch it but it's going to hit the skids and plow right into everything else with a mighty blow.

To: TTOSBT who wrote (2616)	4/11/1999 7:04:00 PM
From: David Miller	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 5102

The most worrying aspect of all this has to be the on-the-record comments made immediately following the pair of resignations - "Inprise board members told analysts Thursday they were surprised by the resignations and had no definitive plan for recruiting successors. Board members also told analysts the two executives were not forced out." Assuming these are true statements, you have to consider i) a scenario where the Board and Del Yocam were in terminal disagreement, ii) that the quarter numbers were themselves a sufficient reason for the pair to up and quit in such an unprofessional manner, or iii) the twosome had to distance themselves quickly from the company to avoid a conflict of interest. If i), then why was the Board surprised and unprepared? If you are aware that your CEO is so adamantly opposed to a course of action under consideration, would you not have a backup plan in place? After all, there were already executives at the head of each operating division, why not simply de-emphasise DY's departure by talking up the fact that he would not be missed? If ii), then shame on Del and Kathy for not minimizing the impact by staying to face the music before falling on their swords. They left the Board without any defenses at all - the last thing they could do was to use numbers as a justification, when the expectations for the quarter were already colored by the downsizing one-time charges. If iii), both sides will have acted honorably, but have inflicted significant collateral damage in doing so. The market is not known as a mindreader, after all. The most positive spin I could put on the whole sorry mess is that Del and Kathy are aligned with a party that wants to do something the Board is reluctant to do, like take over some or all of the business. Ironically, given the price movement since their departure, they may have even put this in jeopardy - there would be a few shareholders pretty annoyed if it turns out that their actions lowered any price they were negotiating. The reverse of this, that the Board wanted to sell and the duo disagreed, is also possible of course, but less likely. After all, their payoff would have been significantly larger if they had stayed until the end. Just some idle musings over a rather sad situation. david