Development 'Lockdown' Predicted Before Millennium

greenspun.com : LUSENET : TimeBomb 2000 (Y2000) : One Thread

http://dailynews.yahoo.com/headlines/tc/story.html?s=v/nm/19990305/tc/lockdown_1.html

is it just me or does this article seem vaguely schizophrenic? viz:

"In an enterprise as huge as NatWest, investment in new technology runs into hundreds of millions of dollars a year, and involves scores of projects, not just a few lines of dated computer code. NatWest said it had put 54 new high-tech retailing processing centers on hold while the bank sorts out Y2K-related projects.

``A lot of this (Y2K work) has come out of capital budgets,'' said economist Cynthia Latta of Standard & Poor's Corp. ``Some companies have found Y2K costing more than they thought and they're running behind schedule.''

Equally unsettling for the economy, if capital budgets have been raided for the relatively nonproductive work of fixing computers instead of investing in new growth, a more long-term drag could be forming. ``It's hard to quantify,'' said Latta. ''We don't have a (U.S.) recession in our baseline, but we do have slow growth and possible recession early next year.''

followed a bit later by

"But since the Web has largely been built over the past five years, it's considered far less fraught with Y2K threats -- indeed most new systems on the shelf now are mostly certified as bug-proof -- and it also holds the promise of fast-growing e-commerce.

The growth of great ``Web farms,'' armies of small computer servers patched together at large Internet sites to handle millions of users, is helping drive the industry's growth.

Intel Corp., the largest chip maker in the world, underscored that growth potential last week when it told a conference it was shifting its product development to the Internet to capture the $1 trillion it expects from e-commerce by 2002. ``The Internet,'' said Intel Executive Vice President Paul Otellini, ``is as important to Intel's future as silicon was in our past.''

In getting set to take on the new millennium, the fast-moving e-commerce boom is reminding people that time waits for no one -- even if it is a bit buggy.

``People are trying to gain competitive advantage in e-commerce,'' said Hambrecht and Quist analyst Walter Winnitzki.

``A lot of investment in infrastructure is going toward supporting that. There's some caution over Y2K, but companies have to keep moving forward.''

hmm...

-- Arlin H. Adams (ahadams@ix.netcom.com), March 05, 1999

Answers

The Internet as a whole is unlikely to go down. I predict that the Internet will become the rallying point for rebuilding the technological and corporate status quo, especially in the face of a crippled Postal Service.

So I'm not surprised to see a certain schzoid quality here at all (though punting on Y2K will bring its due penalty, no doubt).

-- BigDog (BigDog@duffer.com), March 05, 1999.


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