Tonee,
I guess it isn't over.
Gates Sees Some Y2K 'Snafus' to Come
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Bill Gates, chief executive of software giant Microsoft Corp. (NasdaqNM:MSFT - news), said he expected some relatively minor year 2000 computer glitches to crop up in the coming weeks, even though no major disaster followed the changeover to the new year.
''There is still a little mess that will have to be cleaned up,'' Gates said during an interview on Saturday evening on Cable News Network's ''Larry King Live'' program. ''It's not going to be catastrophic, but there will be a lot of snafus.''
Gates, speaking from Microsoft's headquarters in Redmond, Wash., said he was not surprised that the world experienced no problems in terms of infrastructure.
''Things like elevators and planes and missiles, I thought people would be able to do a great job of making sure there were no dependencies there,'' he said.
''In the coming months ahead, you're going to hear about billing systems, tax-related software,'' he told King's audience.
The date change to 2000 from 1999 has caused no major malfunction to global computer systems among the world's international corporations. From airlines to manufacturing to the securities industry, companies have reported that Y2K-related problems did not materialize.
The Y2K bug stems from mainly older computer systems programd to read only the last two digits of a year. If the glitch is left uncorrected, some systems could misread 2000 as 1900, causing systems to malfunction or crash.
But technology experts from Connecticut-based GartnerGroup Inc. (NYSE:IT - news) have said that only 10 percent of problems stemming from the date change will pop up in the first two weeks of the new year.
''There may be some business software failures once the work week starts on Jan. 3 and 4, but we believe the problems will be solvable -- 90 percent of them within three days,'' said Matthew Hotle, vice president of the GartnerGroup's year 2000 research, in a conference last week
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