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Technology Stocks : IBM -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jonathan Edwards who wrote (6021)	12/7/1999 6:26:00 PM
From: Arrow Hd.	Respond to of 8220

I would add a couple of other thoughts to this Y2K discussion. Right now the wild card is in the PC business area. For example, IBM mainframes have been made Y2K ready by IBM going back to product lines marketed in the mid-80s. Some PC vendor's PCs marketed up to the mid and late 90s still had non-compliant microcode and some software vendors were still using old style date code methodologies in writing code. The only law suits to date that I have seen have involved PC software companies whose software products were non-compliant and either refused to make them so or charged an unethically large dollar amount to do the fix. There has been no mainframe litigation at all to date and I watch this closely. So we really don't know what will happen in the PC or even the UNIX server and switch and routing businesses come next month. They say they have no problems. What they are really saying is that there is enough incremental business in the fourth quarter to make their numbers and therefore, there are no business or revenue/profit problems but we have no idea what is going to happen in the first quarter and some of these companies don't either. That is why Congress was passing laws to provide some level of protection to companies that come clean with whatever problems they have as soon as possible. IBM has a web site that declares what product lines by machine/type/model and EC level are Y2K ready and has communicated this to their customers many different ways. The same is true with software at the version/release level. So I would expect IBM is ready for Y2K. That said, the fact remains that the world's commerce runs on the IBM (or PCM compatible versions) mainframe platform and these mission critical applications have to work before anything else, including the millions of PCs that are out there, get any attention. So data centers get frozen to insure that each company can operate at least at the "food and shelter" level of trade. I think the cleanest of the examples is probably Cisco. Intel, as we know from the data integrity problem of a few years ago, could have imbedded chip problems and not know it, and MSFT ... well with their recent checkered past I probably should not even guess on that one.