Here is the link to this article written in September 1998:

How To Think About y2k

Ray

-- Ray (ray@totacc.com), July 26, 1999

Answers

The entire article is excellent and worth a read. Here's a snip from it which is ironic since it's now July of 1999:

[snip]

Y2K Principle #8: *** Large organizations all say the same thing ***

Go to any large company's web page. Then look at government web sites. They all say the same thing: "We know about the problem, we're working on it, and we'll be done fixing code and ready to test our systems on Jan 1, 1999." Let me put it this way - Some organizations have a billion lines of code to fix, some have a few hundred thousand; some started working on Y2K in 1989, and some started in August 1998. Yet they *all* say they'll start testing in January '99. Is this just a coincidence? Will they really all be done by '99? Sure they will - and monkeys might fly out of my butt, too. They quote Jan. 1, 1999 because that's the latest credible date they can give and still claim compliance by 2000. The web site compliance statements all come from lawyers (which explains why they all say the same thing), and probably have no relation to the organizations' actual Y2K compliance progress.

[snip]

-- Linkmeister (link@librarian.edu), July 26, 1999.