You have to look beyond the US on this. We're a global economy. We do not function in isolation. Nor do Fortune 1000 companies act in isolation ... they depend on many smaller and medium-sized companies.
Agreed. But won't economics exert a powerful influence here? If the large, responsible corporations start demanding that their suppliers and partners be Y2K-compliant, there will be a tremendous economic incentive for these companies to get there before their competitors. Its the governments, which don't have to compete, that worry me most.
Now look abroad. They haven't been doing anything.
I don't know about Asia, but I've heard that you can't go anywhere in Europe without reading and hearing about Y2K. Awareness is accelerating.
The biggest time and financial investment is in the testing phase.
Testing is so difficult because its so hard to find the last few bugs. You get rapidly diminishing returns from incremental testing time in terms of bugs found and fixed. The majority of problems can be found and fixed quickly and easily. Typically, 10% of the code does 90% of the processing. If they get that 10% right, the problem looks a lot less ominous.
There are billions and billions of embedded chips out there. The estimate is that 5-10% will fail. The only way to fix them, is to find them ... then replace them individually.
I have no experience in this area, but it seems to me that less than 5-10% would even be date-dependent. Still, even 1% of billions of chips would be a huge problem. Do the manufacturers of these chips know what they sold to whom? Are their designs on file where they can be checked for compliance and modified if necessary? Again, once a non-compliant device is identified, there will be a large economic incentive for a compliant competitor to replace it (if not the chip, then the entire device).
I definitely don't think Y2K will be a non-event, but I do believe that an awful lot can be done in the next two years to lessen its severity. I'm open to all evidence that indicates otherwise. |
