This article was posted on an earlier thread, but I thought a re-post justified. Why? This "take" on Y2K is pretty much the standard in the IT trade press. For example, PC Weekly is widely recognized as an excellent trade journal. It's coverage has been balanced, but the general news on Y2K is positive. Y2K problems are being fixed, particularly in the U.S. It may be early to call Y2K a "nonevent," but it is difficult to deny the tremendous effort (and success) of many companies in addressing the problem. I plan to take Mr. Hayes advice. On New Year's Eve, I'll raise at least one toast to the hard working IT folks who helped fix all the problems. Cheers.

Regards,

http://www.computerworld.com/home/print.nsf/all/990712B4AE

Y2K: Bor-ing!

It's been a lousy year for The End Of The World.

By Frank Hayes 07/12/99 Dang! By now I was expecting stories of rioting in the streets as a hundred thousand unpaid state and municipal workers stormed city halls and state houses demanding their wages. I figured the cities would be burning, the freeways would be drag strips and the garbage would be piled high in the summer heat. After all, wasn't July 1 the day most states and cities started Fiscal Year 2000? And wasn't that supposed to signal the first wave of major-league Y2K computer crashes and the beginning of The End Of The World As We Know It?

The End Of The World hasn't had a very good year in 1999. Deadline after Y2K deadline is marching by, and no one seems to notice. They don't notice because, for the most part, things aren't failing. July 1 came and went, and state and city governments are still running, paychecks are showing up and computers aren't crashing.

That's the boring reality of Y2K: business as usual.

The Y2K-is-a-hoax crowd, of course, explains that nothing has happened because, well, Y2K is a hoax. The end-of-the-worlders insist things will fall apart -- we've just been miraculously lucky so far.

Nope. This boring Y2K reality is one you've literally created. A million programmers are bashing their brains out to beat the millennium bug. And with each step toward success, the biggest technology story of the decade gets a little more, well, boring.

Which is why IT people aren't getting any notice, much less any thanks, from TV networks and local newspapers. The End Of The World would have been a pretty big story, maybe bigger than Jordan and Gretzky and Elway all retiring. But business as usual isn't news. It's boring.

Matter of fact, there's lots of Y2K good news that hasn't been getting much play in the papers. Like the steady stream of announcements by little, local electric companies we've never heard of, that their power generating systems have passed Y2K tests. Those are exactly the kind of small outfits, crucial to the infrastructure, that year 2000 experts feared wouldn't have their Y2K act together. But they do. No news. Boring.

U.S. and Canadian airlines say they're 95% ready. Boeing and Lockheed and Airbus say the planes will fly.

Automakers say their cars will run properly.

And 98% of banks are ready, automated teller machines and all, according to federal bank examiners. On Jan. 1, it appears nothing will go wrong. Boring, boring, boring.

Maybe the biggest nonstory is the fact that, though we've already thrown something like a trillion dollars at fixing the year 2000 problem, the U.S. economy is still chugging along. Y2K is the biggest IT project in history, and it hasn't slowed business down. So it's not news.

And how did this non-news happen? A few years ago, we were galloping toward the edge of a millennial cliff, kidding ourselves that Y2K was a problem only for mainframe dinosaurs. No sweat.

Now, after years of sweat by IT shops, things are looking pretty ... well, ordinary. The Y2K disaster prophecies and conspiracy theories are rapidly dwindling from real threats to the kind of bad fantasy we'd expect from a supermarket tabloid.

You did that, IT people. You, and nobody else.

You won't get credit on Page 1 of your local newspaper or as the top story on the nightly news. Those spots are reserved for catastrophes -- not catastrophes avoided.

But we made it past July 1, and we're well on the way to New Year's Day, so somebody ought to say it:

Congratulations. And thanks.

Hayes, Computerworld's staff columnist, has covered IT for 20 years. His e-mail address is frank_hayes@computerworld.com .

-- Mr. Decker (kcdecker@worldnet.att.net), July 14, 1999

Answers

This Hayes fellow chases just about every Y2K Red Herring there is.

Don't Chase the Y2K Red Herrings

-- Lane Core Jr. (elcore@sgi.net), July 14, 1999.

Thanks, Mr. Decker. I'll be a work that day waiting for something to happen. Employees present on 1/1/00 is a part of our contingency plans. I will bring some games and food since I'm sure I won't be busy fixing any failures.

-- Maria (anon@ymous.com), July 14, 1999.

Good grief, Decker is reduced to reposting articles. Has that man no imagination? This is the sorry state of the pollyanna troll?

Take lots of food, Maria , you little sub-troll -- enough for 6 months at least. Also bedding, since you might have to sleep over, and water of course, and maybe even an Alladin lamp so that you might see your code. Then, when the power comes back on you can power up and type in the patches. And you can fix in 3 days what you couldn't find in 3 years.

Yeah, right.

-- ban (trolls@here.today), July 14, 1999.

Whow Maria is baaaack.

Hey Maria,is your monitor fixed ? You know guy's Maria had a problem with her Monitor. She made the mistake of attaching a mirror to it and looking into it sitting in front of her computer.

The result was that the mirror exploded the second her face appeared and the pieces destroyed her monitor.

Nice to see you back Maria just keep away from those mirrors will you?

-- Ha, ha, ha (ha_ha@fake.met), July 14, 1999.

What complete bullshit! ________________________________________________________ "Y2K problems are being fixed, particularly in the U.S." *****

Oh, this is encourageing. This statement could be made if 2 out of 200 million "problems" had been fixed. And isn't great we don't rely on those nations who AREN'T "particularly" fixing y2k problems? AhhhhhhG!! ________________________________________________________ "The Y2K-is-a-hoax crowd, of course, explains that nothing has happened because, well, Y2K is a hoax. The end-of-the-worlders insist things will fall apart -- we've just been miraculously lucky so far." *****

Y2k hasn't HAPPENED yet twit. ________________________________________________________ "And 98% of banks are ready, automated teller machines and all, according to federal bank examiners. On Jan. 1, it appears nothing will go wrong. Boring, boring, boring." *****

Yeah, and the bank got 98% of your account information correct. And 98% of nuclear reactors won't melt down. What a ditz. This guy can't write, he's not funny, and he makes NO valid argument. NONE. Decker, why repost this?

-- Mike (midwestmike_@hotmail.com), July 14, 1999.

Sorry about the messy post above, lets try again....

What complete bullshit!

""Y2K problems are being fixed, particularly in the U.S.""

Oh, this is encouraging. This statement could be made if 2 out of 200 million "problems" had been fixed. And isn't great we don't rely on those nations who AREN'T "particularly" fixing y2k problems? AhhhhhhG!!

""The Y2K-is-a-hoax crowd, of course, explains that nothing has happened because, well, Y2K is a hoax. The end-of-the-worlders insist things will fall apart -- we've just been miraculously lucky so far.""

Y2k hasn't HAPPENED yet twit.

""And 98% of banks are ready, automated teller machines and all, according to federal bank examiners. On Jan. 1, it appears nothing will go wrong. Boring, boring, boring.""

Yeah, and the bank got 98% of your account information correct. And 98% of nuclear reactors won't melt down. What a ditz.

This guy can't write, he's not funny, and he makes NO valid argument. NONE.

Decker, why repost this?

-- Mike (midwestmike_@hotmail.com), July 14, 1999.

Bravo......we Americans have just remediated *25%* of the *WORLD'S* code in break-neck world record time, and it's all been tested and verified. It has, hasn't it? Mr. Pecker, please say it is so....it is done....it is the truth, right? RIGHT?

You wouldn't lie, would you? Feel free to jump in here maria and tell us WE DID IT! YIPPEE-SKIPPEE.

-- Will continue (farming@home.com), July 14, 1999.

As anybody who has read my posts knows, I'm hardly TEOTWAWKI on Y2K; at the same time, I find this "Computerworld" article a real laugher.

As somebody said, lots of red herrings here. I didn't know that anybody in the past year was ever seriously concerned about cars not running because of Y2K (that one ranks right up there with "planes will fall out of the sky"). There is concern about whether or not GM, for instance, will suffer serious production interruptions, since it has over 60,000 vendors, 7,500 of whom are considered "critical" to daily operations (analysis by TAVA, which is also the primary outfit helping GM remediate its Y2K problems in embedded systems in its mfgr. plants--problems called "catastrophic" four times in just one interview last year by GM CIO Ralph Szygenda). If you know the latest NFIB data on the Y2K status of many SMEs just in the U.S., you'll know why the GM head honchos must be having nightmares about their supply lines. Move overseas, look at CIA, NIC, BIS, World Bank, Gartner, Cap Gemini, etc., data, and you'll get even more concerned; for instance, in Taiwan (not exactly one of the worst Y2K laggards, according to Gartner; level II, if memory serves), you'll find that the great majority of SMEs are presently doing nothing (nada, zilch) about Y2K. FOF all the way, hooray, hooray.

I mentioned TAVA. Cameron Daley, chief operating officer of TAVA, which has worked directly with over 100 U.S. electric utilities, says that when called in to do extra testing TAVA has found a number of cases of power companies that have missed Y2K problems in key systems--problems that would have caused power outages. This seems to be why, in a June 30th "Bloomberg News" article, Daley said that regional power outages as long as several weeks are possible. Drew Parkhill of CBN News later called Daley to confirm the story and get additional details; see the thread over on the open forum at Cowles's site, www.euy2k.com. Daley blames much of this negligence on distraction caused by deregulation in the power industry; still, you also have to wonder what might be missed by oil, natural gas, and water utility companies. (And you also have to wonder about what might be missed by some giant mfgr. companies like Boeing.) You can add overreliance on type (sample) testing and vendor compliance statements (up to 50% of which statements may be false; check with BellSouth) to the mix here. Daley made it clear that all the power companies had basically thought they were ready for Y2K; in other words, they weren't lying--they just were wrong.

Re JAE (Jo Anne Effect): Frank Hayes, the writer of the "Computerworld" article, doesn't seem to have a clue here. Reportedly, only about 3% of corporate and govt. software is of this really long "look-ahead" variety anyway, and many programs can be temporarily "fixed" by entering 12/31/99 as the terminus date (which is what was done earlier this year for a number of state unemployment insurance programs, of course). Most of the "high-profile" ("fix it or the public will know!") programs in this area got priority attention--gee, what a surprise. JAE calls for a gradual accumulation of "back office" errors this year, most of which will probably be fixed without the public knowing, but which will take time and energy away from getting ready for the year 2000 rollover itself. According to a Cap Gemini survey (already some months old), 82% of American companies have already experienced at least one Y2K-related problem. Have you heard about most of these? Of course not.

What else? Oh yes, the banks. I've always thought, and still think, that the U.S. banking industry is in reasonably good shape on Y2K, though the feds and Weiss Ratings seem to have some quarrel here. But with Y2K, perception is also, alas, often reality; Mr. Hayes might not be feeling so good if he had known the FDIC-commissioned Gallup poll data I detailed in this forum a week or two ago. And look overseas again and you start to feel queasy. In the UK, eight financial institutions, including a "household name" one, are now on the FSA's "red" status list (meaning those outfits probably won't be able to avoid "severe" Y2K disruptions); the last I checked, 34% of major UK financial institutions were on the FSA "yellow" list (i.e., behind schedule but not out of the game yet). The FSA also maintains a "blue" list ("on track") and "green" list (Y2K ready), but in Sept. or thereabouts the FSA will have to move to just two lists: green and red--that is, either you're OK or you ain't. That's when the fun begins. And remember, the UK is one of those supposedly level I, leading-the-pack countries (with banking supposedly leading all other sectors, to boot). Care to speculate about how well banks are doing on Y2K in certain other countries? I gave up trying to figure out what is going on in Japan, for instance; the recent BOJ data and tests are encouraging, but they seem a mighty contradiction of Japanese FSA data of a few months ago.

Then there are the recent CIA general (overall) Y2K assessments of various countries. If Mr. Hayes is feeling too jolly, he might want to check out the summaries for Russia, China, and Pakistan. (The captain of the Titanic: I was in the mood for a swim anyway.) Or Mr. Hayes might listen to the RealAudio archives (available at www.yardeni.com) of Dr. Yardeni's T-200 Y2K Action Day Conference on June 14th, where Carlos Braga, head of Y2K information services for the World Bank, admits (after some persistent questioning by Yardeni), that some 100 countries got started "too late" (Braga's words) on Y2K. No, that doesn't mean they are all going down in a fiery heap next year; what it does mean, most probably, is that some are going to experience serious infrastructure disruptions and even more serious economic blows (on top of the fact that 35-40% of the world is already in recession or worse), that global trade and international banking & finance are going to get a belly blow, and that, contrary to what the Mr. Hayes apparently thinks, fun won't be had by all.

-- Don Florence (dflorence@zianet.com), July 14, 1999.

I'm with you on this on Mr. Decker.

I too will raise a glass to the men and women of the IT/IS proffession and say "job well done!"

Let the extremists scream and rant about a few failures here and there. They will no doubt gleefully proclaim "see we told you so"! without ever thanking the ones who got the work done.

-- I guess (this@makes. me a troll or pollyanna, take your pick), July 14, 1999.

By the way, before someone asks, no, I don't recall just where that 3% figure for the really "long look-ahead" programs comes from; and even then, one could debate its reliability, just as you can debate the original Gartner estimates about 2-5% of LOC (average) worldwide having date problems. The basic point is that "long look-ahead" programs comprise only a tiny fraction of all corp./govt. programs. As we get into the 100 day, one-quarter, one-month look-ahead programs (starting Sept. 23rd), that number will rise considerably, of course, though still be a minority of all programs.

Can't remember if I mentioned it above or not, but the latest surveys show that 22% of Fortune 1000 companies now concede they won't get even all their "mission-critical" systems (a small fraction of total systems) fixed by year's end. Mr. Hayes might want to raise his glass to them.

And I'd also suggest that Mr. Hayes (and anybody intelligently serious about this issue--a small minority, apparently) spend some time plowing through a few of the magisterial works on software metrics by Capers Jones, widely acknowledged as the world's leading expert on the subject. Start with his book "The Year 2000 Problem" and pay particular attention to 15 to 30-year history records (schedule completions, etc.) for IT development projects and maintenance projects (most big Y2K projects fall between "development" and "maintenance" types), to residual error rates, to inefficiencies (av. loss of 20%) introduced into database accessing and mining by Y2K windowing strategies (which account for roughly 80% of Y2K fixes worldwide), and a host of other not-so-trivial details.

Finally, I don't wish to dismiss Mr. Decker's good intention here; should all thank the programmers, systems analysts, consultants, engineers, and technicians who are struggling to make the Y2K problem much less severe than it would otherwise be. It's just that I find Mr. Hayes's article laughably uninformed, and the Y2K problem still plenty serious, alas.

-- Don Florence (dflorence@zianet.com), July 14, 1999.

Thanks for the great posts Don, but be careful or you'll wind up on Decker's list of seditioners :)

As an exercise for you Mr. D, compare the information content of Don's post to that crap you regurgitated.

-- a (a@a.a), July 14, 1999.

Thanks much for the compliment, though my intention here is not really to take sides or to engage in debates based on personalities, etc. People are entitled to their individual views of this matter; one just hopes the views expressed are sincere and based on evidence. I respect many of Mr. Decker's posts on economics (he is an economist; I am not, though I occasionally play one for this forum!); I do regard the potential Y2K impact more gravely than perhaps he does, though you'll remember that in earlier posts Mr. Decker has predicted a serious-to-severe U.S. recession for next year, which is rather in line with what, say, Dr. Yardeni is predicting. In any case, my main quarrel is with Mr. Hayes's article itself, which was simply not researched as well as it should have been.

-- Don Florence (dflorence@zianet.com), July 14, 1999.

Don:

I think you may have misinterpreted the thrust of Hayes' article. His intention wasn't to say that y2k has been neutralized, so much as to illustrate the difficulty of turning it into a readable story so far. Yes, we may seriously doubt the glowing reports he mentions (and with good reason), but those are the reports out there nonetheless. And there have been precious few newsworthy y2k problems thus far. Understand that 'newsworthy' isn't quite the same as 'serious'. It's really true that computers executing bad code aren't telegenic at all, and also true that just explaining what's wrong is beyond the average listener/reader/couch potato.

So from the media's perspective, all they have to construct an exciting story from is that nothing much has happened yet, and most predictions are that nothing much will happen. How entertaining is it, really, to say that we'll have problems, and some of them might affect *you* out there -- hey, that's *you!*, wake up! But of course we don't know what these problems will be or what you can do about them beyond prepare like for a storm or something. And how many times can you say this same thing over and over before you can't get any more airtime or column inches?

Finally, the media are oriented toward covering what *did* happen, not what might happen. Things that haven't happened but might, unless they don't, make absolutely terrible television. Even if we *knew* the sky would fall, sitting around waiting for it (while it just sits there normally, day after day) is boring.

-- Flint (flintc@mindspring.com), July 14, 1999.

The intent of reposting was simple. The Computerworld article is pretty representative of the IT trade press... at least as I read it. I can see the mainstream media ignoring the Y2K issue. After the first few "This person left a job and moved to the country because of Y2K" stories, it is pretty boring. For the IT press, however, this is a "bread and butter" issue. Even so, it may not be the top story of 1999. So, what's up with the IT press? Are they "shills" or do they have a pretty decent take on the Y2K situation?

Regards,

-- Mr. Decker (kcdecker@worldnet.att.net), July 14, 1999.

Decker, maybe you could answer that question yourself if you were capable of comprehending what Don posted.

Don, good posts. It disturbs may how on one thread someone can post a list of y2k-related problems that, taken together, spell serious trouble. Then on another thread, someone else can post another, entirely different list of y2k-related problems that, taken together, spell serious trouble. Then another and another. The cumulative effect of all these y2k-related problems will be sooo severe.

-- number six (Iam_not_a_number@hotmail.com), July 15, 1999.

Don,

Thank you for providing a very illustrative rebuttal to Frank Hayes' pathetically content-free article. I tip my hat to you that you did not once call Mr. Hayes a moron. Very effective.

-- RUOK (RUOK@yesiam.com), July 15, 1999.

Compliance Status Changes

(for educational purposes only)

"Infoliant Reports Over 2,300 Compliance Status Changes Since January 1999; 44% of Changes in June are Negative; 2000 Products Still Pending Evaluation PRNewswire

Company Multilink  Data General  Microsoft  Computer Associates  IBM PITTSBURGH, July 12 /PRNewswire/ -- There are less than six months left until January 1, 2000, a date that is predicted to seriously impact many different types of computer systems. One might expect that with all of the attention given to Y2K by the computer industry, problems would be known and resolved. Not so says Infoliant Corporation, which has reported roughly 3,300 Y2K compliance status changes since they began tracking this information in 1997. And in the past six months, Infoliant's Compliance Tracker Delta Report has consistently shown a high level of revisions to product readiness.

Infoliant has tracked compliance status changes on over 2,300 products since January 1999. Kevin Weaver, Executive Vice President and co-Founder of Infoliant, attributes this increase in status changes to manufacturers boosting their testing and evaluation efforts as we approach the year 2000. "The increase in status changes during the first two quarters of 1999 is amazing, but there is much more going on than the Delta Report discloses. The Delta Report only announces actual changes in compliance status, not the thousands of updates to corrective action plans that manufacturers have released in the past year, of which there were over 900 in June."

The latest report released by Infoliant Corporation (www.infoliant.com) announces that during the month of June, there were changes in the Y2K compliance status of 359 IT products from such prominent manufacturers as [Data General], [Microsoft], [Computer Associates], [IBM], Intuit and Unisys. 157, or 44% of these changes were "negative" in nature.

Compliance changes to products are deemed to be "negative" when they involve the disclosure of previously unknown Y2K issues or the discontinuation of manufacturer Y2K support. On average, only 33% of the compliance changes for the previous four Delta Reports were negative.

Some details of the June 1999 Compliance Tracker Delta Report: -- 17% of the changes recorded in June were of products that were moved into the "Vendor Will Not Test" category, as manufacturers discontinued support for certain products. -- Nearly 2000 of the products that Infoliant tracks are still "Pending Evaluation", meaning that the manufacturer hasn't tested the product for Y2K compliance.

On a positive note, this Delta Report announces that 50 products that were previously categorized as "Non-Compliant" or "Vendor Will Not Test" are being placed into the "Action Required" category, meaning that the manufacturer has released a corrective action plan for those products.

Approximately 20% of the status changes in June were the result of manufacturers releasing Y2K compliance assurances on previously untested or unreported products.

Over 900 update notifications were sent to Compliance Tracker subscribers informing them of additions to previous corrective action plans and patches.

The monthly Compliance Tracker Delta Report is available on Infoliant's website. It can be found at www.infoliant.com.

Infoliant's Compliance Tracker Delta Report tracks statistics regarding the products which change Year 2000 compliance status within Infoliant Corporation's Year 2000 Network Advisor knowledgebase, the leading resource for Y2K readiness information of off-the-shelf IT products. The Year 2000 Network Advisor currently tracks over 36,000 enterprise, midrange, network and desktop products from over 600 major manufacturers and is used for Year 2000 planning by dozens of Fortune 500 companies, government agencies and hundreds of other organizations world-wide. Subscribers to the Year 2000 Network Advisor can download the compliance information from Infoliant's website.

Customers can also subscribe to the Compliance Tracker service, which sends out automatic E-mail notifications when the Y2K status of a product in the customer's portfolio changes. Some customers prefer to utilize Infoliant's Millennium Direct Edition, which creates a mirrored version of the online database on the customer's internal network, in either Lotus Domino or Microsoft Access formats. SOURCE Infoliant Corporation

(Copyright 1999)

_____via IntellX_____

Publication Date: July 12, 1999 Powered by NewsReal's IndustryWatch"

-- Rachel Gibson (rgibson@hotmail.com), July 15, 1999.

Don,

It was an opinion piece (op-ed), not an academic article. As such, it falls neatly within the boundaries of most Y2K writing.

Regards,

-- Mr. Decker (kcdecker@worldnet.att.net), July 15, 1999.