Daydreaming
www2.computerworld.com
Just a daydream: a link from the Microsoft site on Manufacturing and from their new Y2K site directly to www.planty2kone ;-)
John
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Microsoft Web site to address Y2K problems
Thomas Hoffman
After years of customer frustration with Microsoft's inattention to the year 2000 problem and the impact the millennium crisis may have on its 9,000-plus products, the Redmond, Wash., software company today finally announced plans to put a year 2000 resource center on the World Wide Web by mid-March.
Microsoft's Year 2000 Resource Center will list information about which of the company's products are compliant, how the products handle dates and how to work around problems. It will also offer tools to help fix individual products.
The announcement, made during a Securities Industry Association year 2000 meeting, also marked Microsoft's first admission that it has "been slow in responding to this issue," said Jason Matusow, Microsoft's year 2000 strategy manager.
Microsoft's inaction on the problem "has been a mistake," Matusow said. Microsoft was "head down, moving along with PC technologies'' and failed to grasp the importance of products' date sensitivity and how critical they are to customers' operations, Matusow said.
Microsoft "has gotten into trouble with its customers" over its year 2000 direction -- or lack thereof, said Stephanie Moore, an analyst at Giga Information Group, in Westport, Conn., who documented the problem in a report last July.
In the past, Microsoft told customers that all its products were year 2000-compliant. Those statements were not only inaccurate, they "put a lot of pressure on IT managers who were trying to put together budgets for desktop conversions," Moore said.
However, if Microsoft's year 2000 Web site is successful, "it will be the best vendor response yet to year 2000 compliance [efforts]," Moore said.
For example, Microsoft customers "will be able to query against" the company's year 2000 resource center through a sophisticated database the company will put online beginning as early as March 13, Matusow said. He added that Microsoft will not be held liable for any products that don't work as a result of user customization. |
