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

To: John Hunt who wrote (5883)	6/1/1999 10:14:00 AM
From: J.L. Turner	Respond to of 9818

Y2k hits Washington Post Hamasaki commentary Waaaaait just one minute there. We still have 214 days to go; the banks "get it", the power is on; the birdies are singing; I'm in Worshingtoon DeeCee; you can buy PentiumPro 200 machines for under $400 here. And you're telling me that the Post can't click up a subscription accounting system in, Oh, 2 or 3 hours? As we say in this town, "Say-Wha?" On Tue, 1 Jun 1999 01:05:45, Jo Anne Slaven <slaven@home.com> wrote: > Post gets bitten by the Y2K bug > > amcity.com > (second story)Scroll down past Ferraro story > > --------8<-------------------- > > The Washington Post doesn't want your money. At least not for another > few weeks anyway. > > Despite spending millions of dollars and four years preparing for the > Y2K bug, the city's largest newspaper is unable to accept 52-week > subscription renewals because its accounting department is not Y2K > compliant yet. > > "We are getting all new software and a brand new computer to handle this > problem over the next three weeks," said Post spokesperson Linda Erdos. Linda! June has more than three weeks. You mean 4 or 5 weeks. But hey, what's a 25 or 33% time overrun on an IT project? > She said the paper predicts it will solve the problem in time to resume > offering 52-week subscriptions in July. Lemme see, thirty days hath September, April, June, and November. int(30/7) Yeppers, over 4 weeks. > But some readers are frustrated by this bookkeeping dilemma. > > "Now I have to call them back in two weeks just to pay my bill," a Post > reader said. What kind of nutcase subscribes to a newspaper for a year? Tree Killers! I pretty much stopped reading the printed Post and just drag their online database either in Nexis or at washingtonpost.com > --------8<-------------------- > > Jo Anne So let's mull this over. The Post wants to sell subscriptions. They like the subscribers money and they can charge the advertisers more if they can promise a larger readership. They want to do it but, surprise, they're choosing not to do so. After all, a subscription database and accounting system is simple to click up. Oh and even if it weren't, there are thousands of packages on the market, they can just bop over to Office Depot or Staples or Best Buy and pick up a Y2K compliant Newspaper Subscription Application program. How many newspapers are there? Probably more than there are banks or power companies or gas utilities. Isn't the software generally available? And what about patching the old system in, oh, 2 or 3 hours? They know what the problem is. Just fix it. It's failed, let's fix it on failure. Oh, and this early Y2K failure affects revenue and customers. Hmmm, I thought these things were being covered up. Who was the clueless fool who claimed that? Ooopsie, it was me. I guess I was wrong about them being able to cover these early Y2K failures. Was I also wrong about them coming clean? Let's see.... No, it's reported by something calling itself amcity and not the Washington Post? Could this be, what we call, a clue? Maybe other Y2K failures are not being brayed out loud, "Hee-haw, hee-haw, we're-fools, hee-haw!" What's scary is that these are the systems that look ahead or touch the "00" wall early. The fun is yet to begin.