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

To: Rusty Johnson who wrote (26870)	5/10/1999 11:01:00 PM
From: PJ Strifas	Read Replies (6) \| Respond to of 42771

The biggest problem with MSFT is that they are OS-centric...their entire revenue stream is derived from their OS sales as well as their applications (MS OFFICE) which are optimized to work hand in glove with their OS offerings. This model will one day (soon) be part of the past and like IBM before it, MSFT is doomed to sink in an aging revenue model. I believe the next wave is directory-centric where applications can be written to run on any system, any hardware as long as it can communicate with a directory. In this model, MSFT is at a distinct disadvantage because again, they are late to the party. Also, "extend and embrace" won't work in Cyberspace because no one will allow you to take standards and co-opt them into a proprietary product(s). Another point, product delays that were once tolerated won't be in the upcoming e-commerce revolution. It can't because one quarter is too long to wait for a product when a company's e-commerce offering could mean the difference between success or failure. This reminds me of an old wiseman's quote - "control is the illusion we create to make sense of our world" and too many companies (empires) lose themselves to this illusion (like IBM?). On another closely related topic..... I've heard this real wild rumor - I say rumor becuase I have yet to find any source to confirm it and yet I've heard it from more than one person...MSFT is considering scraping Windows2000 entirely and heading to a fresh code-base. OK, perhaps not tossing the baby out with the bath water just yet but the next version of NT could be fresh. One colleague suggests that the actual source of the rumor is MSFT claiming that they are "testing the waters" and the general reaction of corporate clients and independent software vendors. I believe this "rumor" had it's beginnings in an article I read some time back by a computer science professor who stated that the only thing that could save Windows NT 5.0 would be all new code because bugs were just drowning in the 30+ million lines of code. Either way, it's a very interesting point of view but I couldn't see them doing it even if it would save the product from the ultimate truths of it's design. Alas, Poor Yuric, we knew him well....! Peter J Strifas