http://www.currents.net/newstoday/99/11/23/news1.html

Daily News

Second Major Negative Y2K Change

By Sylvia Dennis, Newsbytes

November 23, 1999

The Compliance Tracker Delta Report for the month included 232 negative status changes, 155 of which resulted from products being down-graded from compliant to another "not Y2K ready" status by their manufacturer.

In addition, the firm reports there were significant Y2K Corrective Action Plan updates for 775 products already classified as "Action Required."

Kevin Weaver, the firm's vice president, said that, with the 118 products for which manufacturers withdrew all Y2K disclosure information, a total of 1,291 products were tracked by Infoliant as reporting some sort of Y2K compliance status change in October.

"All of these changes in late 1999 may mean that companies who thought they had solved the Y2K problem early might experience problems in 2000," he said. If this happens, Weaver said, vendors, lawyers, and insurers are sure to ask what steps were taken to stay on top of the latest corrective action plans.

"With as late as some of these disclosures are being reported, and the bulk of corporate Y2K remediation efforts being completed, the history of how some manufacturers continued to revise Y2K readiness information will surely be scrutinized if failures or losses occur," he said.

Weaver warned that, if nothing else, the changes foreshadow a likely increase in technical support calls from users who didn't get the latest information in time.

Infoliant's Web site is at http://www.infoliant.com .

Reported by Newsbytes.com, http://www.newsbytes.com .

-- Uncle Bob (UNCLB0B@Tminus38&counting.down), November 23, 1999

Answers

Isn't it getting a little late in the game for some sudden increase in "honesty"?

-- I'm Here, I'm There (I'm Everywhere@so.beware), November 23, 1999.

Backsliding, watch out, entering Slippery Slope Zone.

-- Ashton & Leska in Cascadia (allaha@earthlink.net), November 23, 1999.

Shudder. The honesty is bubbling up from the ranks. Here's the usual story after 90% of the project schedule is done.

Engineer says "75% complete. We need more time, more resource."

Project Manager rounds up to "90% complete. Might want to put an extra person on it, unless that would effect my bonus."

Corporate rounds up to "100% complete, bar a few UI tweaks. And bang on budget! Buy more shares!"

Sales rounds up to "110% complete, and it wakes you up with a massage. We've have hit the market six months ago, only our engineers are perfectionists. Sigh, we're so burdened. Have you considered the benefits of a lease option?"

And so it goes until the deadline looms, at which point it slips, corporate slap a new version number on it, and sales starts promising "a massage with a Happy Ending."

Sigh. Seen it so many times. 85% of large projects are late, 25% are cancelled. There's no reason other than arrogance and willful self- deceit for believing that Y2K would be different. :( :( :(

-- Colin MacDonald (roborogerborg@yahoo.com), November 23, 1999.

It's possible that the downrating has more to do with legal strategy than with real data. That is, each software vendor has to decide whether it's riskier to say they are ready, and then face inevitable lawsuits when firms have problems, or to say they are NOT ready and have an out from the lawsuit.

Doesn't matter if they are ready or not, when the lawsuits start. Any suit is going to include as many defendants as possible (the "deep pocket" theory), so all vendors will be included whether or not their software contributed to a company's failure.

If you say you aren't ready, then you can ask to be removed from any lawsuit brought based on Y2k failures, because you had already warned the plaintiff that your stuff would not work.

So you might as well say your software won't work, and leave the buyer hanging. It's not like they have time to switch, at this point. After the rollover, if your stuff does work, you can always say you made an error when you said it wouldn't. Who can fault that?

This is just tactics, not a real compliance issue. Sheesh, there are times when I regret law school. I hate thinking like this.

-- bw (home@puget.sound), November 23, 1999.

The downgrade may also be the result of further testing by either the vendor or it's customers. Software once thought ot have been fully ready may since have been shown not to be under some circumstances.

A piece of sftware I use has been described as having a "Y2K issues" after it had been certified to be "Y2K Ready." The issue was discovered by a customer, not the vendor. Furthermore, the issue turned out to be so minor that it might not affect anyone. (You had to be running a certain program during the rollover, and that program had to be in one particular routine at rollover time for the issue to occur. The damage: The program would crash and have to be restarted, but there would be no data corruption.) Once the issue was found, the vendor changed the designation on that software from "Y2K Ready" to "Known Y2K issues" despiste the fact that the problem itself is pretty trivial. A patch has been released, although nobody I know of has so far bothered with it.

-- Paul Neuhardt (neuhardt@ultranet.com), November 23, 1999.