Grommit, I know how you feel. I drove up to your neck of the woods today (Mandarin) and bought a Basset Hound puppy and look what happened while I was gone. New high for my portfolio!! Maybe I should go back and buy some more. (The poor people have three litters--looked like 101 Dalmations with short legs and long ears.)
I should probably post the following directly to Dan Spillane, but I trust he reads all these posts. I wanted to follow up on our discussion on this thread a few weeks (months?) back about the possible effects of Y2K spending on corporate spending on networking products. Dan argued that much of the spending would be to replace outdated systems rather than on changing old code.
I recently found my June issue of Worth magazine which my wife had stuck in a stack of catalogs. Lo and behold, it had an article called "The Bunk on Year 2000" which seemed to support Dan's argument. Some selected quotes:
".....But the Giga Information Group, which based its estimates on the actual costs borne by companies undertaking year-2000 repairs, cut the Gartner numbers to $300 billion worldwide and $140 billion in the U.S. Jerry Grochow, chief technology officer of American Management Systems, estimates that no more than a third of the money being spent on work related to year-2000 problems is actually for repair projects. 'Two-thirds of (the year 2000 budget) is for replacement,' says Grochow, 'and replacements that might well have been done anyway. Even some portion of the renovation work is really maintenance that would have been done on the systems no matter what.'
....Still, one-third of $140 billion leaves $46 billion in software repairs,no? Not if you listen to Hughes Electronics. Bill Meyer, Hughes director of information technology, says the company will spend from $50 million to $70 million on year-2000 efforts, but it all comes out of other projects. His additional budget: zero. The money Hughes does spend on year-2000 repairs goes to Computer Sciences Corporation...which manages Hughes information systems. Even without the millennium bug, however, CSC would still have got the money for different projects. Year-2000 work adds little or nothing to the bottom line..."
Incidentally, Roxane Googan, whose appearance on CNBC sparked this discussion originally, was back on this week and now no longer works for Gruntal. She is now an "independent consultant." I wonder if that is by choice.
Enjoy the ride.
Bob |
