INTERVIEW:
Question 1
Why in 1993 did nobody worry about the problem of the millennium bug?
Answer
It is very much an issue of human nature. People procrastinate; they put things off until
tomorrow that they know they should be doing today. But there are some other issues as
well. One is that people could not believe that computer programmers could be that stupid.
This was the non-technical person’s perspective. And finally there’s another
reason and that is when a non-technical person perceives computers by watching movies like
A Bug’s Story, for example, which is entirely done by computers, when they
hear about other things done by computer programs, they find it very difficult to believe
that we could not write a simple program to fix this problem. So for those reasons it took
a long time to overcome denial and resistance.
Question 2
Is this part of a larger problem, which is the fact that industries that produce software
are not under any kind of control, and are free to put on the market software with bugs?
Answer
Well, one of the realities that we have to accept is that nobody writes software that
doesn’t have bugs in it: software is written by people and people are fallible. We
will always have bugs inside our software. What makes the Year 2000 bug so very different
is that is affects all computer systems at the same time and, therefore, again from a
non-technical person’s perspective this Year 2000 problem is somehow unique. To say
that computer software companies are somehow free to do this is a misunderstanding about
market forces. There are going to be a large number of lawsuits because of this, and they
will be held responsible once we actually see the beginning of the failures.
Question 3
Who can take advantage of the millennium bug?
Answer
You can take advantage of the millennium bug by fixing it before you competitors. If you
get this problem solved before your competitors, you will be able to do two things. One,
you’ll have a market strategy to say that you are Year 2000 compliant, and two, you
will be able to pick up business from your competitors who lose business because of the
inability of their products or their services to handle the Year 2000 problem.
Question 4
What is the situation in the various countries?
Answer
The situation is very different from country to country. In North America we are much
farther ahead than anybody else. A lot of the time in Europe has been spent focusing on
the euro, and as you most probably heard, there will be problems with European systems;
there are even as we speak. Down in South American the attitude has been to wait for
tomorrow; they have only woken up very recently to the issue. So while the US is ahead of
everybody else, we are also affected by other economies in other countries. It is going to
be very interesting to see how failures on other sides of the world affect anyone who has
made their own systems compatible. I don’t believe this is the end of the world as
some people describe it. I do not believe we will lose power for a year. There are some
very silly stories being told, but I do believe that January will be the most interesting
of months we’ve ever seen.
Question 5
When are the first problems going to begin to manifest themselves?
Answer
The Year 2000 problems have already begun. We’ve been seeing Year 2000 problems for
the last decade. Specifically, credit cards are one of the best examples. Credit cards
have an expiry date that reaches out 3 or 4 years from the date which you are given the
new credit card. So if you got a credit card in 1997, the expiry date should have read
"00". However, the credit card companies found that when they gave out those
cards with an expiry date of "00", the retailers could not process those cards
through their systems. So they had to reduce the expiry time. Instead of putting
"00", they put "99". I got a credit card in February of 1998 that
expired in June of 1999. So a period of time less than 2 years, which is unheard of, and
is very expensive. There were reports from Sweden that an airport passport distribution
system was incapable of handing out passports because of a Year 2000-related problem. They
will continue to raise their heads through this year. And in a way, that’s a good
thing. It will prove once and for all that the Year 2000 problem is real and we must be
prepared for it.
Question 6
So the problems will begin in 1999?
Answer
Very much so. The computer consultants in this industry have been saying for years that an
organization really should have everything finished before the end of 1998. Now, part of
that reason was so that testing could continue throughout all of 1999. But the other
reason was that the problems were expected to begin in 1999. And if you were still fixing
your old code, the operational problems, the day-to-day problems that you would run into,
would make it very difficult for you to concentrate on fixing the old systems. You would
have to take your best people away, they would be distracted. And as we have seen already,
the Year 2000 problems have begun in 1999. It should really be called the 1999 computer
problem. It is not something that will only happen on January 1st, 2000.
Question 7
What do you really think is going to happen in January 2000?
Answer
We have to accept one thing about the future and that is that no one is able to predict
exactly what is going to happen. You can make some generalized statements, and I will
certainly be happy to do that. In any organization when you implement a new system or you
make changes to an old system, when you put that back into production, you always have one
or two problems. In January of the year 2000 we have a situation were literally hundreds
of thousands of companies will be working with software that sees 00 data for the very
first time. When that happens we can expect conservatively one or two problems per company
world-wide. So we are immediately looking at hundreds of thousands of computer problems.
The good thing is, if we have been due diligent in fixing what we knew to be wrong,
hopefully those hundreds of thousands of problems will mostly be very trivial, minor
issues that we can fix in less than a day. If, on the other hand, we have not been
diligent, then some of those problems could take a little bit longer than one or two days
to fix. The hope is that we have done enough work so that the vast majority of these
things are trivial. There will be some problems that will shut down an organization for a
week, possibly two. But those should be extremely rare with any luck. I don’t expect
it to be the end of the world but I also don’t expect anything to work properly in
that first month. I expect long delays at banks and government offices and passport
offices. Standing in line is going to be a new hobby for the new man in the millennium!
Question 8
So your conclusions?
Answer
Computers have been of tremendous benefit to us. So much so that they have become
ubiquitous. They are transparent to the average person on the street. We don’t
realize that everything is controlled by computers. When these computers have a bit of a
headache on January 1st, 2000, when they have a hangover, there will be an
impact. I think the primary way we will notice this is a huge degradation in customer
service. Standing in line will be the way of the future.
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