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

To: John Mansfield who wrote (1082)	2/20/1998 5:15:00 PM
From: John Mansfield	Respond to of 9818

Smaller German firms not prepared for euro-survey ' German small and medium-sized companies are not technologically prepared for the coming of the euro or the computer modifications needed to deal with the dawning of the year 2000' ' Only eight percent had taken concrete steps to deal with this problem. ' ''Especially for small and mid-size companies these two (the euro and the year 2000) are drastic changes' --------- 03:15 p.m Feb 17, 1998 Eastern FRANKFURT, Feb 18 (Reuters) - German small and medium-sized companies are not technologically prepared for the coming of the euro or the computer modifications needed to deal with the dawning of the year 2000, a survey published on Wednesday said. The survey, carried out by commercial software manufacturer Sage KHK and the Allensbach market research institute, showed that although 80 percent of the 350,000 companies analysed expected a punctual start to monetary union on January 1, 1999, only a third had taken action on this basis. Similarly, for 70 percent of the companies the adjustments needed for computers to cope with the date change in the year 2000 were still not a concern. Only eight percent had taken concrete steps to deal with this problem. The so-called ''millennium bug'' of the year 2000 stems from short cuts taken by computer programmers in the past. To save memory space, they abbreviated dates to their last two digits, so that 1999 becomes 99. This means computers will read 2000 as a meaningless 00 and could crash at the turn of the millennium. ''These results show that many companies still do not have a comprehensive idea of what monetary union and the year 2000 date change could mean for them,'' Christoph Michel, head of the Frankfurt-based software house, told a news conference to present the survey. ''Especially for small and mid-size companies these two (the euro and the year 2000) are drastic changes. Changes which demand early planning and conversion.'' The smaller the company and the less foreign business it had, the truer this was likely to be, Michel pointed out in a statement. And companies that failed to keep up with the changes risked being unable to stay abreast of their competition. He referred particularly to potential difficulties in dealing with accounts and incoming and outgoing payments if a company was having to cope with calculations in both marks and euros without the adequate software programmes to do so. But Sage KHK also said that solutions to the two problems were still available and not expensive at present. Complications were likely to arise when firms did not make timely preparations to plan and introduce the changes. REUTERS' infoseek.com