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Technology Stocks : Discuss Year 2000 Issues -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sandra Simon who wrote (496)	11/23/1997 1:05:00 PM
From: Sandra Simon	Respond to of 9818

Year 2000 glitch fuels high-tech feud "We're projecting 30 percent (of organizations) will have mission-critical system failures," says Matt Hotle, research director at the Gartner Group, a Connecticut consulting firm. Nonsense, say many corporate and government officials who insist that their year 2000 problems will be fixed well before the witching hour. "The average person won't have to worry about it all," says Ron Cytron, a computer-science professor at Washington University in St. Louis. "It involves a lot of hard work, but it'll get done." Will not. Will too. Will not... What in blazes is going on here? With a mere 768 days to go, one would think the experts would agree on whether the computers that control nearly everything from banking systems to electric power to traffic lights, will function properly on Jan. 1, 2000. Another excerpt: Leon Kappelman, a computer-systems professor at the University of North Texas and co-chairman of a year 2000 working group of the internation Society of Information Management, talks to people in the trenches and doesn't like what he hears. "At this point, we have so much work to do we can't possibly get it done," said Kappelman, who periodically surveys the society's membership of 2,700 information-technology managers, academics and consultants to get a sense of what companies and other agencies are actually doing to solve the problem. From his most recent survey, Kappelman estimates that between 25 percent and 40 percent of the nation's companies and agencies are doing "real work" Between 35 percent and 50 percent aren't doing anything, and the rest are still "planning." This article has a lot more info.. A MUST READ!!

To: Sandra Simon who wrote (496)	11/23/1997 1:29:00 PM
From: Sandra Simon	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 9818

More from the article... Computer experts debating how millennium bug will bite <Fixing software is doable, but will it be done? Another excerpt: Still other organizations may be doing a good job in their own shops, but not worrying enough about other vendors and suppliers who might not be. Joan Paul and Michelle Johnson, attorney with Thelen, Marrin, Johnson and Bridges, a San Francisco law firm that has roughly 20 lawyers working on year 2000 issues, say they typically see two kinds of companies: "Ones that really understand that this is a big problem and have really big, broad teams" addressing it, says Paul, and others, "even large companies, with one person in the IT(information technology) area" charged with solving everything, says Johnson. A Mercury News spot check of local and state companies and agencies supports that assessment. At New United Motor Manufacturing Inc in Fremont, for example, officials at the joint Toyota-General Motors car-manufacturing plant have sent letters to all suppliers and vendors "demanding" to know the status of their efforts to become year-2000-compliant, says Jogen Shah, general manager for information management at NUMMI. The letters include detailed questionnaires about other firm's computer systems, and companies have until the end of the year to respond. Similar efforts by Consolidated Freightways Inc., the giant trucking and transportation company based in Palo Alto, already have turned up some smaller vendors who have decided to go out of business rather than pay the cost to solve their year 2000 problems, says Consolidated official Mark Nelson. At Granite Construction Inc of Watsonville, Larry Hazen, director of information systems, speaks confidently of his firm's upgrading to new computers, which he said will be finished well before the end of 1999. But he acknowledged that he's not yet focused on suppliers and other companies who do business with Granite. "That's probably a concern I need to put on my list," he says. The rest of the article talks about the global picture as well as what the securities industry, utilities and banks are doing.