Bill, you said;
"...but it seems that the people who are truly in the
know - the people who manufacture computers and publish software - do not see this as an earth-shattering issue..."
From a recent news article
On a recent visit to Hong Kong, Eric Schmidt, the 14-year veteran of Sun Microsystems who recently left the position of chief technology officer at Sun to take up the job of chief executive officer at Novell, said he had a special plan for the night of December 31, 1999: "I am not going to be in an elevator or a plane. I think I will sit
home and read a book."
Every company I have visited recently ( I work for a computer vendor) has a Y2K programme in place, so unless they are all deluded fools, I think they probably see it as a problem. Like a company I visted recently where a multi-million $, 20+ switch, multi million subscriber telephone network would stop working on 1/1/00. Nothing inherently difficult to fix, but expensive because they dont know where in the code those few bugs are, because it affects multiple systems (switch, billing, customer care, network mgmt),and because they have to stop working on new systems in order to fix and test. Testing is the killer. I would guess there is a 1:5 ratio between coding and testing.
They are doing their own fixes in house, but because of that they have ha to stop work on multiple new projects. I am not involved in selling them Y2K services so I think I can objectively say that 'if it looks like a problem, behaves like a problem, well, it IS a problem'
The only item under discussion is the scale and effect, not whether there is a Y2K problem.
I work in the Telecommunications industry, so I dont know whether my comments about every company apply outside of that industry. Telco is usually much more rigorous about testing than other industries (possibly even more so than finance)
Regards
Joe C |
