Turnover Turning Into a Nonevent
Two years ago, the U.S. Senate’s Y2K chief predicted a 40% probability that the nation’s power grid would go down as a result of year 2000 computer failures. As recently as September, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan worried aloud that “fear-induced” reactions by consumers and businesses would disrupt the nation’s economy.
But with only hours left before the 2000 rollover, the consensus of experts is that America will experience nothing more than scattered, manageable problems as the nation and its computers greet 2000. And there is no evidence of hoarding or any other signs of panic by the public.
The rise and fall of the Y2K problem as a potential national crisis reflects what some experts now view as a combination of two major miscalculations: The gurus not only underestimated the determination of the public and private sectors to fix their computer systems but also the public’s ability to maintain its composure.
Experts--from John Koskinen, the head of the President’s Council on Year 2000 Conversion, to leading technology consultants--agree that the country will not experience any major troubles due to computer failures during the new year rollover.
“Thanks to the work of tens of thousands of computer professionals who have made billions of lines of code ready for the year 2000, we’re forecasting a relatively quiet weekend with isolated problems,” said Matthew Hotle, vice president of year 2000 research at Stamford, Conn.-based GartnerGroup, a technology consulting firm.
But this confidence did not come cheap. The federal government estimates that, ultimately, government agencies and private companies will spend $114 billion finding, fixing and replacing computer code and embedded chips that were programmed to read only the last two digits to denote a date. Glitches could occur in computer programs that misread 2000 as 1900.
Analysts tell the public not to assume that if Y2K problems are not visible over the weekend, all those billions of dollars were wasted.
“People will have trouble understanding what all the money was spent for, but there’s no question there would have been catastrophic consequences had the money not been spent,” said Larry Eisenstein, an attorney who heads the year 2000 task force at the Washington law firm of Swidler Berlin Shereff Friedman.
The level of public concern as demonstrated in polls and in purchases of survivalist goods peaked a year ago and has declined steadily. Now, only 5% of those responding to an Associated Press poll conducted earlier this month said they thought Y2K would cause “major problems” in the United States, and only 19% said they planned to take any extra cash out of the bank because of the Y2K bug.
Pollsters and industry analysts believe that several factors have contributed to the steady decrease in public concern over Y2K in the last year.
“I think that people who are knowledgeable about information technology are very sensible. They didn’t feel or judge that there was any reason to panic. There were all kinds of steps being taken. You had some sense that the government and business was on top of this,” said Andy Kohut, who heads the Washington-based Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, an independent polling firm. “The other portion of the population is oblivious to [information technology] and remained blissfully oblivious, thinking they didn’t get it so they didn’t have to worry about it.”
Dave Jones, the chief of a Silicon Valley company that has been inspecting large corporations to ensure that their Y2K fixes caught all the bugs, said that over the last few years Americans have become accustomed to the fact that computers fail and get fixed all the time without the world coming to an end.
“The U.S. population is very computer-savvy,” said Jones, CEO of Mountain View-based Reasoning Inc. “They understand that this is a date-related software problem that can be fixed. They figure that American industry is taking care of this problem. A lot of that is true.”
Another reason for the lack of worry is that many of the industries that spent millions of dollars on Y2K fixes also invested heavily in spreading the word that their systems were Y2K-ready. The federal government also broadcast widely its assessment that the nation would not be stung by the so-called millennium bug.
That was an essential part of their mission. For example, even if a bank had repaired all of its date-sensitive computer codes, it could have a major Y2K-related problem if its customers had no confidence in their computer systems and withdrew their cash en masse.
“I think that’s done a lot to reassure the public that Y2K is not as severe a problem as the sky-is-falling pundits had been prophesying,” said Perry Harris, an analyst at Boston-based Yankee Group, a technology consulting firm.
One comforting fact for the public is that many computer systems have already encountered Y2K computer glitches and the problems have been handled without any headline-grabbing consequences. The federal government’s fiscal year 2000 started Oct. 1, credit cards have been issuing cards with expiration dates past 2000 over the last year, the travel industry has been taking reservations for 2000 for months and companies have been ordering inventory for 2000.
Surveys show that more than three-quarters of those companies have had some kind of Y2K computer glitch.
“I think the significance of that is that virtually no one, including us, have noticed most of those,” Koskinen, the president’s Y2K czar, said this week. “There are glitches every day that we don’t see, that get dealt with, and virtually all of the Y2K glitches, to the extent they are out there, have been handled thus far without any significant inconvenience to anyone.”
The Y2K specialists caution that despite their quiet optimism they do believe that companies will encounter some Y2K glitches both over the weekend and over the coming months. Typical problems will be misprints in billings, errors in orders and mistakes in financial statements. They urge consumers and businesses to carefully read paperwork.
Jones’ company inspects computer code for large corporations after it has been remediated for Y2K problems, to check if the fixes worked. In the billion lines of code Reasoning has inspected, it has found three to 10 errors per 1,000 lines of code, Jones said. This is in code that was already fixed and tested. His clients include financial institutions, telecommunications companies, utilities and other major corporations.
Nagging Problems After New Year
“The most common error would have been that these systems would have made computational mistakes--they wouldn’t have failed,” Jones said. “We do believe there will be a lot of nagging problems for the months following the new year.”
Although most large corporations and federal agencies attacked the Y2K problem with gusto, many small and medium companies and individuals opted not to modify their computers before the new year but to wait until they have problems and fix them then. Those who put their head in the sand likely will be bitten by the Y2K bug, the experts warn, and the impact on them will depend on how much they rely on their computer systems.
The international outlook for the weekend is less clear because of the range of preparation in various countries. The U.S. government expects an increase in infrastructure failures overseas--including power, water, transportation and communications--in the first two weeks of the year.
But most of these troubles will be invisible to the majority of Americans, the analysts predicted. They all agreed that the big Y2K media event on the New Year’s weekend will be a flop.
Neil Jarbis, head of Y2K worldwide for EDS Corp., a Plano, Texas, company that gives technical advice to businesses and government agencies, said he is confident of the 1,300 Y2K projects his company’s 6,000 engineers undertook worldwide and predicted that the 2000 rollover will not amount to much.
GartnerGroup’s John Base said that, in addition to all the remediation work that has been done, many companies are staffing up during the critical rollover and curtailing their operations. So any glitches that do occur will be quickly fixed.
“This is probably going to be one of the dullest nonevents in the history of civilization,” said Base, a Chicago-based research director on GartnerGroup’s Y2K team.
* Y2K VIRUS ALERT
Experts are warning of viruses designed to spread on Jan. 1. C1
* YEAR-END GLITCHES
A 911 system and a British credit card system failed. C3
