Bob,
Beg strongly to differ with you, but the issue is so serious that you have normally bullish individuals like Ed Yardeni factoring the issue very prominently into his market prognostications. He predicts a 60% chance for a nasty recession in the year 2000 based on what he already figures will be a very dismal report by OMB in March regarding governmental awareness.
If it wasn't such a big issue then the SEC would have no strong impetus for requiring publically traded companies to include discussions of material impacts and unfunded liabilities related to Y2K. And even if the situation is not serious for the US, it will be for those countries who are still now even in the problem assessment stage.
One example. SSA stated working on Y2K back in 1989 when a number of their forward projecting programs starting running afoul of those insidious "00"s. They discovered that they have 30 million lines of code and commenced remediation efforts. That was in 1989. They were scheduled to finish by mid 1998 and begin system testing.
The bummer was that they discovered 30 million more lines of code in various State run, but federally funded, SSA systems just last year. Kinda throws a monkey wrench into the situation when you find you have only 2 years to complete an additional project after spending 8 years fixing the first one. I would have hated to see the faces of the programmers when they officially discovered all of that new code... :0(
Another example. The regional bank where my account is alone has 22 million lines of code to be remediated. They commenced assessment in mid-1996 and are unwilling to provide me written assurances that they will be compliant by 2000. They does not provide me great financial reassurance and I will be removing my money from my accounts by then. Now this is a regional bank here in the mid-atlantic region and very well run. Imagine all of the smaller institutions who don't have the financial resources to fix the bug themselves. Imagine when their depositors start to withdraw cash... "Bank Holidays" bringing on any disconcerting visions??
As for the individual who has claimed to solve the problem, his name is Robert Bemer. Mr. Bemer has impeccable credentials. However, his Vertex2000 process is still unproven by any ISO standards. He will likely be able to remediate many lines of COBOL II code, but that is all that his solution currently supports. What about your Dbase files with 6 digit years, FORTRAN, JOVIAL(DOD programs), ADA, and the variety of other languages that have few programmers skilled in their fundamentals.
Let me make this clear, THERE IS NO SILVER BULLET. Look at the Y2K threads and you will find an interview by an individual who actually interviewed Mr. Bemer and received a personal demonstration. It was impressive, but limitations were acknowledged.
Regards,
Ron
And P.S. You're quite right. They literally saved hundreds of billions of $$$$$ over the 30 years that those 2 digits were ommitted. However, now they may face $600 billion worldwide in costs to assess, remediate, and test those very same systems in under two years.
Btw, did I mention embedded chip systems?? See TPRO research thread for a nice resource on this issue.
Robert Bemer's website can be found at:
bmrsoftware.com
Regards,
Ron
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