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

To: John Mansfield who wrote (1377)	4/2/1998 1:35:00 AM
From: John Mansfield	Respond to of 9818

'Where we are now: Y2K status and reality check, 1998Q2' The first quarter of 1998 has come and gone. Where are we on the Y2K front? First let me thank Cory for his latest WRP; it puts things very well. I think that the major item in it can be summarized as Not Yet. The US government is not yet at full speed, private industry is mostly unaware, the public is almost totally still unaware, the stock market is hitting new highs every week, and I just heard a report that the (USA) index of leading economic indicators shows moderate to good prospects for the rest of the year. I will sum up Y2K awareness today as early. To make it short and somewhat sour, we made only moderate progress in Y2K awareness last quarter. The prospects for Y2K awareness for this quarter seem only moderate, and that is not good. I note that Tony Blair in the UK has gotten up in front of an audience of real people and made a serious speech on Y2K, using words like contingency and breakdown. Here in the US Bill Clinton has made jokes about Y2K for a humorous occasion, the Press Club roast. If these events turn into a trend I would have to say that this points to the UK taking over leadership in the Y2K area soon. Some happenings I have seen and noted. The IT talent pool in some geographical areas for some types of talent is indeed dry. Sorry I can't give specifics, but it is happening. Other areas & types of talent not so. Serious articles in various areas continue to appear and will get attention at some point. For example when Business Week runs articles like its recent Y2K emphasis issue it probably means that an additional 1% or 2% of CEOs in various areas will ask someone in the IT department to at least "look into this thing and report back, will you?" And those who take the trouble to look into the issue in depth are reporting back that there is a severe problem and it is time to do something about it. So progress is being made, just not very fast. So the predictions, here are some numbers off the top of my head: 30% chance of a breakthrough this quarter, Y2K making it as a major issue. 70% chance that moderate growth of awareness will continue. 1998Q2 like 1998Q1. Almost no chance that we will backslide into denial/ignorance. Some weeks back I noted that we had made a breakthrough, that major newsmedia are starting recognize the problem. Was I premature? Don't know yet. But the number of articles in media everywhere is growing; I would have to say that the drumbeat of media coverage continues and is growing. When does it become unignorable? Who knows, depends on other stuff in the world. I'll just say soon but not real soon. There are a number of things about Y2K that are making it unusual for all concerned and very hard to predict: It is an event like no other in history and likely for all time. As a result there is no track record and no experience in this area to draw upon. We will make up the future as we go along. If we're a band playing a Y2K concert we would be showing up for a gig with no rehearsal and some of the players either don't read music too well or don't know that there is a gig. Its arrival time is known precisely to the microsecond. It is a crisis caused by what I will call Ostrich Dilbertism; gross mismanagement of technology due to negligent ignorance and miscalculation in the highest industrial and governmental positions and offices. It is the first event of this magnitude to be precisely monitored on the Internet as it is happening. It cannot be meaningfully measured. Any sort of precision in either the pace of remediation or awareness is impossible and efforts to achieve it are foolish. This is because we don't know what to measure and we don't know how to measure it correctly. There are probably a few organizations that are measuring Y2K progress correctly, but we don't know which ones they are, and for that matter, they don't know themselves. They may think so, but they are wrong. Also the odds are that if they measured it correctly up to now they may not do so this coming quarter, or in 1999. If you took the combined writings about Y2K on this group and elsewhere, it is possible and maybe even likely that the volume of anticipatory writing on the subject will exceed the historical. In effect this newsgroup is what I would call "living journalism", the telling of stories and venting of opinions by the participants and observers directly without the intervention of reporters and editors. We are here. A summary. For the quarter just past, 1998Q1, the damning of faint praise: some progress was made in Y2K and there were some hopeful signs. But we needed more than some and we didn't get it. For the coming quarter, 1998Q2, more progress will be made, some chance of a breakthrough. But only some. JR _________ From: Jim Rivera Newsgroups: comp.software.year-2000 Subject: Y2K status and reality check, 1998Q2 Date: Wed, 01 Apr 1998 16:13:50 -0800