Just who is to blame for the Year 2000 problem?
Some people will put the blame for this brewing data fiasco on the shoulders of
the managers and the programmers of the 1960's. After all, they should have foreseen
that software doesn't wear out (since it is not physical). They should have known
that their products would still be widely used some 30 years into the future, right?
Or perhaps they will blame computer hardware designers for failing to design and
test their products for Year 2000 compatibility. Ten or 20 years ago, products were
built to last, and therefore the computer manufacturers should not have been so
sloppy. They should have foreseen that their equipment would become the foundation
of the Information Economy, right?
But this is placing the burden of prophetic responsibility
on people whose job has always been to simply bring in the most dollars to the bottom
line. Theirs was not the role of visionary, or global organizer, or even weather
forecaster. They were doing their jobs and making the design tradeoffs necessary
to stay in business, just as every other type of company was doing then and still
is doing today.
No, the blame for the computer problems of today and tomorrow must be placed squarely
on the shoulders of those who are in positions of power and responsibility right
now. Why have the large and medium-sized businesses only recently begun addressing
the Year 2000 issue? Because they have been distracted and confused into wasting
time on the desktop computer revolution. There is only so much time in a manager's
day, and there are only so many things that he or she can spend time fixing. There
are only so many items that can neatly fit onto an agenda, or into a budget plan.
And more and more in this decade, the growing burden of support and maintenance
caused by Microsoft products has evaporated any "free time" or contemplative
opportunities for IT managers.
Yes, I am placing the blame for the coming Year
2000 fiasco squarely on the shoulders of Bill Gates and his cohorts at Microsoft.
Not alone, of course, are these people in sharing responsibility for the coming
twenty-year recession. Also to blame is the current self-serving elite echelon of
managers who made the decision to trust Microsoft, an upstart company with no background
in long-term planning, data handling, reliability, maintenance, or any of the other
checklist requirements that we put under the umbrella term "enterprise."
Instead of trusting the warning voices of technically knowledgeable staffers, these
elite pad-scribblers and memo-doodlers put political correctness and popular appeal
ahead of the laws of nature. You remember those laws, don't you? Laws like exponential
growth, computational complexity, inertia, learning curves, cascading failures,
and the other unyielding rules of life in the information fastlane. These laws cannot
be abridged, and they cannot be ignored without eventually suffering a penalty.
Possession of an MBA or a key to the executive washroom does not constitute a "get
out of jail card" for the Information Age.
But not just the big companies suffer from this
erroneous mindset. The end of small business in America will result from the pop-culture
mentality of the trendy PC business, egged on and encouraged by a too-hip media
always anxious to find a story that sells, not a story that informs and educates.
Emotion-laden appeals to overthrow the established order of text, mathematical correctness,
and rigorous testing -- in other words, willing acceptance of neurological decadence
-- do not solve the long-term issues of poor scholastic training and the absence
of organizational skills. Indeed, this attitude of anything-goes contributes to
the false sense of security that people have about their data.
What lies ahead for the computerized world? Nobody can say for certain what the
next few years will bring. However, a good starting point is to try to put some
numbers on the table to quantify the trends.
1. (20% chance) A 20-year recession. Most of the Y2K fixes being promoted are nothing
more than "sliding the window" a few years into the future by subtracting
5, 10, or 20 years from the date fields. Since the fixes are different for each
company (and indeed *within* each company), Y2K failures will happen at semi-random
intervals for the next 20 years or so.
2. (20% chance) The end of the Democratic Party
in America. Forget Lewinsky, Jones, and Flowers. People will be asking a lot of
hard questions when the communication, transportation, and financial infrastructure
begins suffering "storms" of outages and failures. An eight-year Presidency
should have produced a long-term strategy to address these issues. A Vice President
claiming to be a technology "wonder boy" may also begin looking like a
sick joke.
3. (10% chance) The end of the Republican Party in America. If the Democrats decide
to deflect the blame away from the executive branch and successfully put the stigma
of scandal and distraction onto the Republican attack dogs, the "pox on both
their houses" mentality may pull down the two-party system from both pillars.
4. (60% chance) The end of Small Business in America. Not every small business will
disappear when their Windows coaches turn into Y2K pumpkins; however, smaller firms
who failed to upgrade to IBM OS/2 or at least a Unix variant may find their tax
and financial records to be an unrepairable mess. Furthermore, it's not just the
large base of older PCs and Windows machines that will suffer; any non-Y2K-compliant
application on ANY platform may doom a business to the scrap-heap of history. Small
businesses who rest in the smug self-assurance that they don't have a "mainframe"
or "legacy" problem will be devastated. While some small businesses will
survive, the small business as a cultural phenomenon and an economic engine may
disappear.
5. (30% chance) Microsoft cashes in, bails out,
and relocates to mainland China. After shoveling the Y2K-doomed Windows95 product
out the door, Chairman Bill took a little trip to the wide open spaces in rural
China. The train ride with his buddy Warren Buffet was possibly more of a scouting
trip than a getaway. The real getaway may occur in two years, when Congressional
inquiry into massive failures of the military infrastructure based on recently-acquired
Windows products puts the heat on the Redmond cabal.
6. (70% chance) Massive global consolidation of all categories of business. If you
think the LBO's and mergers of the last twenty years have been huge, "you ain't
seen nothing yet." Major corporations with non-Y2K-safe infrastructures will
likely be eaten by those who have wisely built on OS/2 and Unix foundations.
7. (40% chance) A major pension-fund meltdown, leading to poverty and unrest among
retirees. Since most pension funds have become heavily leveraged in stocks, and
most of these funds are built on a handful of "anchor companies" -- like
Microsoft -- when these companies take a dive, many pension funds are likely to
go broke. A high percentage of this suddenly poorer older generation also happens
to be politically active. Consider what that might mean in light of items 2 and
3 above.
Of course, some, all, or none of these things might happen. Probably a dozen other
impacts not listed here will be more interesting and of major historical significance.
We do indeed live in interesting times.soft manipulators.
