Ken,
My conclusions are based on inferences that I made from the information that they gave me. I did not ask any of them anything specific. Again, my conclusions are based on personal experience, not hearsay. The point is though, that from the oil industry to federal and state governments, they all had very large Y2K remediation budgets that they were anxious to re-allocate for other projects. This doesn't strike me as common sense behavior for a business that is expecting problems caused by Y2K.
As far as embedded systems, I would defer to Edwarda, but my experience has been that though they have clocks, they generally are not date sensitive (I have not seen any that are, but I do not claim to be an expert on embedded systems). So it may be that they are very difficult to fix/replace, but it is certainly not impossible to do so and is probably not seen by the oil companies as a significant risk. Again, I do not know this, but their behavior just doesn't seem to support that they see this as a risk area.
What would you do if you were the president of a big oil company and you thought that your revenue stream was going to be cut off on Jan 1?
Some guesses:
1. You would probably sell your stock
2. Your friends and other insiders would sell their stock
3. You would stockpile oil so that you would have some revenue flow
4. You would look for alternate means of revenue
I do know that #4 is happening, but I don't think that it is related to Y2K. The stock prices of the big oils don't seem to be crashing and as a matter of fact, my indicators say that they are in a bull market. This is not something that I would expect to see if the insiders were selling wholesale.
I know that I didn't answer your questions exactly as asked, but we can see if we can get there through discussion.
JXM |
