On This Day Pre-Y2K
Confused by any of the jargon you see below? Check the Y2K Glossary!
January 4, 2000 Permalink
Watching CNBC today (NBC’s Financial Cable TV channel) and heard something that most people wouldn’t recognize as a potential Y2K problem. It seems Credit Suisse/First Boston warned on Applied Materials’ (AMAT) 1st quarter earnings. It seems that the new IT system that AMAT installed didn’t “ramp up smoothly” causing “production, odering, and manufacturing delays”.
Now I wonder exactly *why* they totally ripped out their old system? Could it be........SATAN??? No, I’m willing to bet Y2K. These are the kinds of problems companies that went the replacement route are going to run into, especially if they started late and didn’t take the time to get the system they implemented customized to meet their needs. Look for more news of this type in the financial news, because you won’t see it on the nightly sound bite shows.
—Prince Etrigan, Time Bomb 2000 Forums (LUSENET), 01/04/00
It was an interesting rollover. Surprised what works and surprised what doesn’t. I’m just relieved that no one got hurt.
If you thought that peer pressure stopped companies from revealing their Y2K status BEFORE rollover, you ain’t seen NOTHING yet.
Nobody wants to stand out, so the ongoing glitches (and most really are small glitches), will never be reported to anybody. The first you will hear about serious failures is when the CEO jumps ship, followed by chapter 11 procedings.
Remember: Y2K is not a heart attack; it’s colon cancer. Long and ugly and scary with an uncertain outcome.
But don’t deny the possibility of success. I’m proud of my fellow geeks. And flabbergasted.
—Lewis, Time Bomb 2000 Forums (LUSENET), 01/04/00
Two weeks from now we’ll have seen a fair cross section of real news, some in mainstream media, some here. By March or so we’ll see the initial results, which might be a wave of bankruptcies or might be stories of heroic efforts keeping SMEs running. By June we’ll be able to estimate pretty well what the total cost of Y2k failures will be.
Y2k took 30 years to build into our systems, and we’ve been working to fix it since about 1993. Small breaks started showing up in early 1999 (my first personal sighting was January 2), and breaks are predicted at LEAST to the end of 2000. It’s ludicrous to expect a complete understanding by today, the second working day of 2000.
The ship is scraping on the iceberg now.
—bw, Time Bomb 2000 Forums (LUSENET), 01/04/00
What has to happen before Wile E. Coyote plummets to the desert floor leaving a silhouette in the bedrock six feet deep?
HE HAS TO LOOK DOWN FIRST! and see he’s about to crash. We are now at that point in the sequence of events where his suspended animation has begun, but he has not yet looked down. Once he does, as you know, the feet will fall first, then the torso, then his neck will stretch to the breaking point, then his head ill vanish. Last of all you will see a little hand on a loooooong wrist, waving bye-bye.
—SH, Time Bomb 2000 Forums (LUSENET), 01/04/00
