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Technology Stocks : Iona (IONA) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Capt who wrote (406)	4/17/1999 8:56:00 PM
From: Kashish King	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 491

I don't see how the stock price could have been justified at $14 and thought $4 was probably a better value. The reason is simple: they're in a market space with blockbuster growth fueled by the Internet and intranet, yet their sales are falling. I'm also concerned about their story regarding delayed orders, is their base really that fragile? If they don't have sufficient sales to establish a mean stream of revenue, they're in trouble. Were there no surprise sales? Were there no accelerated orders? I don't buy the delayed order story, it's old, it's tired, it's B.S. in my books. CORBA provides a language-neutral, platform-independent object model and object bus, however, I don't care about that if I'm using Java on both ends and everywhere in between. Enterprise Java Beans, JDBC, RMI and other Java-based technologies obviate the need for CORBA and when Java starts dominating distributed application development, kiss your CORBA good-bye. I want to use Java objects and if they're running on another machine I want that abstracted for me, with as little effort as possible. Fine, there are CORBA interfaces to Java that give that to me but why not optimize and replace the CORBA with a Java-specific object model? Oh, my COBOL and Fourth developers won't be able to use that, what a shame! Actually, they can: write a COBOL or any compiler you like, for the JVM. There are already several languages running on the JVM that have nothing to do with Java. If IONA focuses on Java I see them a big winner, if they go with DCOM I see them being eaten as as another Micro-snack. Microsoft wanted to crush CORBA and they are probably overjoyed that things appear to be going badly with their little investment. WARNING: I made the same comments in private at $14 and a couple of days later it popped all the way to $20. My negative outlook for IONA will have little to do with the direction of the stock in the short term and they could very well turn things around. I am sure it will fill the "gap" between $14 and $20 at some point.