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Politics : Formerly About Applied Materials -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: 16yearcycle who wrote (21213)	7/8/1998 2:22:00 PM
From: Ian@SI	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 70976

*OT OT OT** To Gene Kearney, For someone like me who accumulates data and acts on the most reliable persons opinion, this is a nightmare. I'd hate to think I was adding to your nightmares. Re Y2K: 1. Have you ever known any Software to be bug free? 2. Which is most likely to cause a catastrophe? A known or an unknown problem? 3. Who would benefit most by exagerating this set of bugs? Who is most vociferous about the impact of this problem? (My answer would be the consultants who get paid to plan, develop, test, implement and maintain Y2K compliant corrections or replacement systems. Is Yardini looking to generate more volume of "Sell"s then "Buy"s when the world doesn't come to an end? Or is he merely an (or not so) innocent dupe of the consultants? 4. When Software fails, how many companies go out of business as opposed to correcting or bypassing the problem? Will there be some pain? Almost definitely. Will there be the mother of all recessions as a result? Almost definitely not. IMO, internal statistics on numbers of mandays of maintenance effort will cause some Maintenance managers to get their butts kicked a little more frequently and a little harder than normal. We're now at the point where the maintenance manager knows the New Development teams aren't going to bail them out. They also have little hope of moving to another job before the bugs hit. They have a simple choice: Spend manpower to prevent the bug or spend double the manpower to fix them as they cause failures. ... and knowing the pressure they're under, most will probably wait for the failure before taking action. FWIW, Ian.