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Strategies & Market Trends : Bob Brinker: Market Savant & Radio Host -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: theodore who wrote (4673)	4/20/1998 4:01:00 PM
From: wooden ships	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42834

Theodore: If I knew the precise answer to your scintillating question, I could rent out my expertise for $1000 per hour plus expenses. I do not mean to seem flippant here. An excellent summary of the Y2K pro- blem appearing in the 2 March 1998 "Business Week" magazine quoted various experts who differed markedly in their viewpoint regarding Y2K. Tony Hampel, a group manager for Year 2000 marketing at Sun Microsystems calls the Y2K problem a mere "annoyance, a speed bump." On the opposite side are those who worry about the apparent compla- cency of foreign governments and entities. The principal at Software Productivity Research, software expert Capers Jones, estimates that "Western Europe will not achieve Year 2000 compliance for even 65% of the applications that need Year 2000 repair." Assessments like this have men such as Philip Kozloff, of Citibank's Credit Policy Committee, expressing some measure of concern. To be sure, Kozloff sees the problem as serious enough to trigger "a whole new round of country debt negotiation." Y2K alarm ringer, Ed Yardeni, chief eco- nomist at Morgan Grenfell, believes that "if foreign banks fail to comply, that could have a serious impact on world trade." Yardeni stated that Y2K portends "a 40% chance of a sharp downturn (in the US economy)." We do know that government agencies, as a rule, lag behind major corporations in compliance(small comfort to those corporations vis a vis their non-compliant suppliers). Business Week cites the one example of Massachusetts, where a good portion of the non-compliant software doubtless originated, which reports that "40% of state agen- cies had not yet even begun an effort to become Year 2000 compliant." Larry Olson, chief information officer of Pennsylvania, estimates that "only about one-third of states are in decent shape." Of course, the IRS has already sounded the warning that their antique computer systems are hardly ready for anno Domini 2000. Rumor has it that the computer experts at the IRS are still working on how to recycle their ongoing and continuous stream of IBM punch cards. In any case, the most powerful minds of the world, Brinker among them, seem to express variant assessments of the severity of this computer glitch. Most assuredly, the bell shall toll anno Domini 2000 in 20 odd months. Whether the bells tolling the new millen- nium will be Edgar Allan Poe's dreaded "iron bells" or his merry "tintinnabulating silver bells," who can tell? In any case, the American populace is waking up to this problem. By a stroke of irony, a caller to the Rush Limbaugh show just today raised the Y2K problem for the very first time on that show.