'Y2K QUOTES FOR THE MONTH
In a crisis and emergency situation, the free market may not be the best way to distribute resources.... If there's a point in time where we have to take resources and make a judgement on an emergency basis, we will be prepared to do that. - John Koskinen [federal Y2K czar]
Within the business programming community, the conventional wisdom is that a minimum of 12 months testing of the remediated software would be necessary before putting it into production. That makes December 1998 the last possible month to finish remediation and commence testing. If that's true, then the next few weeks starting mid-December 1998 should be marked by several thousand new press releases per day from corporations proudly announcing on-time achievement of the planned milestones. If you do not see such press releases, then it should be safe to presume that the Y2K project is behind schedule. - Dick Mills
At the WDC Y2K meetings, VPs from NY financial organizations have reported that during the 1987 stock market meltdown, the trading volume was too large for their systems to process. After several weeks of analysis, several companies decided to write off the anomalies, "You may owe us millions or we may owe you millions but neither of us can reconstruct what happened." This is one reason that the meetings are attended by executives from NY and the buffet is so lavish. They (I'm not naming names) are running scared (taking Y2K seriously). WDC Y2K is their way to get the word out, to communicate with the Fedgov that Y2K is a serious matter. Overall, it has been a noble effort but not the success I'd hoped it would be. I have met some interesting people at WDC Y2K, heard some incredible stories... I have shared all I can but the comments before and after the meetings are the most shocking. - Cory Hamasaki
I'm back in NY doing a Y2K consulting gig at a Wall Street brokerage. I was here briefly in July and August. What a difference four months make. In every office now, every hallway, every elevator, coffee shop, restaurant, and street corner in the financial district, all you hear is Y2K this, Y2K that, Y2K blah blah blah, and it's all problems, troubles, and surprises. The brokerage I'm in now is slipping schedules.... My former Y2K colleagues across the street, at a very large bank currently involved in takeover rumors, tell me that all of the schedules are slipping there as well, and that testing is not getting done on time, or at all. A very nasty testing problem that I discovered in August, involving aging the data on a whole bunch of client-server databases, has been ignored, because nobody knows what to do about it. I talked to a fellow college alum at a party this weekend, who is now a corporate attorney involved in writing SEC Y2K disclosures. She told me that she's being pressured to ignore the international operations of multinational operations, and focus on domestic operations, where the news is better.... The most obvious question to me is this: when are all of the securities analysts who work in this neighborhood going to start tuning in to the same conversations that I'm hearing, which after all, are right in the buildings where they work? ....Stand by for mass realization, fear, loathing, and chaos. Like every other group-think movement on Wall Street, this massive school of fish will turn on a dime, and then turn on each other. The water won't be safe until all the blood is gone, and I gotta tell you, some of these fish are fat. - Internet post, anonymous at her/his request
I have a cousin that is in mid to upper management in a fairly large bank here in the South. He told me over Thanksgiving that they were within 8 weeks of being through with their remediation. Hardware has been changed out in most locations, etc., etc. In other words, good news. I made the comment that at least he didn't have to worry then. His reply was that even though they would have a good amount of time to test (almost all of 1999), you could bet they were in for lots of nasty surprises as the testing moved forward. Furthermore, he said that even if this went great, with few problems, when they "went live" they were going to have a mess because of all the interconnections. Now while this is nothing new to what we've all been hearing, I did find it interesting to hear it from someone this high up in a bank. Sorry I can't give the name of the bank, but he would obviously like to keep his job! - Greg Sugg
I have two cousins and a friend who all work for different hospitals in L.A. County and each has been told they will not be able to take vacations around the turn of the millennium until deep into 2000. - Michael Taylor
Some of the Fortune 5000 are doing well. Some have their code renovated and will finish their testing in the next few months. Most will go Chevron.... What if 4,000 of the Fortune 5000 suffer months of IT outages? There are 50,000 S/390 style mainframes in the world, suppose 40,000 of them have Y2K application problems that disrupt production for weeks or months? ....Maybe there is something that can be done in the little time left. Based on discussions with programmers who live and breathe enterprise computing, I'm not encouraged. - Cory Hamasaki
Serious testing -- end-to-end testing, and integration testing involving multiple firms, and multiple combinations of "supply chain" interfaces -- has not yet begun in any of the key industry sectors. All we know for sure is that 1999 will be The Year of Testing Dangerously. - Ed Yourdon
[Australian] December 1999 futures bills are priced over 30 basis points higher than the average of the September 1999 and the March 2000 bill. Somebody has already priced in a short-term market-induced interest rate rise at that time. I can't think of another explanation other than the Y2K bug. - Chris Caton
Russia, known to some as Bangladesh With Missiles, has an official Y2K budget of zero. The country has no money for Y2K; it has no money for anything these days. Reports in late October 1998 indicate that food supplies have fallen to approximately a 2-3 week level, and that fuel stockpiles are also falling; chances are that Russian bureaucrats, business leaders, and citizens are far more concerned about the lack of food and fuel, as winter approaches, than they are about fixing a pesky computer bug whose consequences won't be felt for another 14 months (by which time they may be dead anyway). Similar problems confront the governments and businesses throughout several Asian countries; it doesn't give me much hope that Y2K projects will be given a high priority throughout the region. - Ed Yourdon
Be aware of the Millennium Bug, but don't do anything about it.... There's nowhere to hide. - Ric Edelman
Plan for the worst, and hope for the best. - Ed Yardeni
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