So GARY NORTH, how on earth can then pull-off the EURO, a thing YOU said was 5 to 6 times more difficult than Y2k itself?
GARY NORTH ON THE EURO +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
"The Eurocrats have bet the survival of Europe on this pipe dream.
The bankers have refused to allocate programming resources to y2k
because the software revisions demanded by the Euro could not be
met if programmers worked on y2k.
Result: Europe will miss both deadlines.
The deadline is fixed: Jan. 1, 1999. It has been trumpeted for years.
It has been fundamental to one of the great public relations
campaigns of all time. But Europe will not make this deadline. The
world will know on Jan. 4.
What you must pay attention to after January 4 is the back-peddling,
the excuses for failure, the redoubled efforts to impose the new
software, and the delay of y2k repairs in the name of the Euro, which
will be dead on arrival. All of these excuses will be applied to that
other missed deadline, namely, "compliance on December 31, 1998,
with a full year for testing."
Europe's public relations hacks will go into action in just a few
weeks. They will tell us why the deadline was not really very
important, how things are progressing nicely, etc.
But there is this problem: the programmers will have missed the
deadline. The deadline was the token of great and unstoppable things
to come. PR giveth, and programmers taketh away".
206.67.59.5
Daily Fix: What Have We Learned From The Euro?
zdnet.com
By Mitch Ratcliffe - ZDY2K
It's still a little too soon to assume the Euro has arrived without data-corrupting incidents. With the first few days worth of trading in the currency just being settled, the possibility of problems still exists. But, as a bellwether of things Y2K, the Euro transition should provide substantial peace of mind to those concerned that the world's data infrastructure will come unglued on January 1, 2000.
The Euro was thought to affect one-third as many computers and mission-critical applications as the Y2K problem. The global cost of Euro conversion was estimated to be approximately $100 billion, which is one-third to one-eighth of the cost of Y2K, depending upon which analyst you listen to. As a problem of similar scale, the Euro conversion is an excellent basis for making projections about the Y2K date roll-over.
The comments about the Euro transition made by experts will sound familiar:
"All industries will be affected in one way or another," according to Richard Seabrook, a consultant at UK-based Solomon Software Ltd.
Capers Jones, chairman of Software Productivity Research, and the foremost expert on computer programmer productivity, said Y2K and the Euro are "the two biggest problems in the world." In a white paper, he wrote: "The timing of the Euro is one of the worst public policy decisions human history because it pits the world's second largest software project (the Euro) against the world's largest software project (the Year 2000). There are not enough software personnel available to complete either one of these massive efforts in time, and the whole idea of trying to accomplish both of these on approximately the same schedule is going to cause major economic problems."
With all due respect, because I think Jones is a Very Bright Guy, he's apparently been way off the mark in his analysis of the Euro challenge. And, with each day that passes without Euro-related problems, his projections for Y2K should be treated with increasing skepticism. So too, should every Y2K scenario that calls for massive outages occurring all at once all over the world if every organization is not 100 percent finished with Y2K repairs. It is clear that partial Euro compliance has not hampered the supply chains, the markets or the operation of individual companies.
Now, there are mitigating circumstances that could pad Euro-related errors. The currency doesn't actually exist in paper or coin, so much consumer spending is still going on in the native currencies the Euro will replace in 2002. Likewise, inter-company and intra-company transnational trade can still take place in pre-Euro currencies. However, at some point along the line, all these transactions are being accounted for in Euros, since 11 nations have pegged their native currencies to the Euro.
Credit card companies, financial services firms, trading houses, markets and many accounting departments in government and corporations had to be ready for the Euro. It appears that they made it, despite the alleged impossibility of the task.
As problems emerge, which I am sure they will, it will be important to examine the facts for evidence that they were the result of ill-prepared application software or just plain programmer error. If, for example, as two taxi metering systems, in Singapore and Sweden, fail to handle the transition from '98 to '99, Euro problems are caused by short-sightedness or stupidity, that tells us that the Euro transition was relatively benign. If, however, a non-compliant computer at a bank or large corporation fails to handle a Euro conversion, resulting in a cascading corruption of data in banks and other companies, this will be proof that, in fact, there was a real threat from non-compliance or partial non-compliance.
There are mitigating circumstances with Y2K, too. Contrary to popular opinion, the Y2K deadline isn't hard and fast, but will arrive in stages based on important fiscal and application dates, not all at once. January 1, 1999, and January 4, 1999, were two such dates, because they presented the possibility that applications looking forward one year, into 2000, to perform projections would fail. From all indications, this hasn't happened.
Considering how few, how piddling and how quickly were fixed, the Y2K-related problems reported around the world with the arrival of 1999, the early estimates of Y2K's impact should now be set somewhere in the center of the spectrum. The evidence points to an impact between "No Problem" and "The End of the World As We Know It.," rather than at the extremes. More to the point, the evidence now points to a region of risk that could be labeled "Headaches, not disaster."
What can we take from the Euro launch? A little peace of mind and the data necessary to test assumptions about the risk from Y2K non-compliant systems. The introduction of the Euro proves that institutions, organizations, companies and consumers can, if they prepare, meet IT deadlines successfully, even if all the computers aren't ready. Human ingenuity works.
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