5/16/2000

Like the number one performer on the stock market bulls list, NetOptix, Interleaf Inc. of Waltham made 1999 a dazzling year on Wall Street by carrying off a bold bet on a new direction that has led to the company's acquisition.

Michael Ruettgers runs EMC, in which there "doesn't seem to be a weak spot," one analyst says. (Globe Staff Photo / Tom Landers) The Bulls 1. NetOptix 2. Natural Microsystems Corp. 3. Interleaf Inc. 4. Cubist Pharmaceuticals 5. Seachange International [ See complete chart ] The Bears 1. J. Jill Group 2. Raytheon Co. 3. Mac-Gray Corp. 4. Lifeline Systems Inc. 5. RoweCom Inc. [ See complete chart ]

In January, Web site software company BroadVision Inc. of Redwood City, Calif., announced plans to buy Interleaf, which moved into systems for publishing Web pages, for more than $850 million in stock. By the end of March, Interleaf stock had soared more than 1,300 percent from a year earlier, up from $3.19 to $47 a share. That was the state's third-best stock performance.

In the mid-1980s, Interleaf was seen as a hot, promising company in the then brand-new field of desktop publishing, selling services that companies publishing operating manuals or other documents could use to save themselves the cost and hassle of sending printing jobs out to a typesetting house.

But by 1997, competition left the company in such bad shape that it faced a stock delisting on the Nasdaq and its shares often traded for less than $1 apiece.

Under new chief executive Jaime Ellertson, Interleaf decided to plunge into a technology called Extensible Markup Language. XML has come to be seen as a far better technology for putting material into Web pages and making it accessible to many different types of devices, including wireless phones and Palm Pilots.

''We bet the entire company on XML,'' Ellertson said last year. ''We did a bunch of analysis, but it was a guess ... [and] we guessed right.''

Last year Interleaf rolled out a product called BladeRunner that converts material written in Microsoft Word to XML, and a second product that sends XML-language data to wireless devices.

But while it did dazzling things on the stock-performance list, the company also shows up in a less-desirable neighborhood of The Globe 100 survey: Its 11.9 percent drop in net income during 1999, to a full-year loss of nearly $4.7 million as it poured resources into developing the XML product, landed it at number eight on the list of the 10 worst-performing Bay State companies based on year-to-year percentage change in net income.

PETER J. HOWE