Thursday night I went to a forum with Ed as a keynote speaker. I was impressed. He is quite articulate, and yet speaks with authority. while he makes no out and out predictions, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to add two and two together. I stand by my belief that panic will ensue before the date arrives, and I am also having a strange feeling about the interconnectedness of everything. When you consider that the government whines over 1-2% drops in major markets, and a 10% drop is catastrophic, what do they think will happen. The numbers that Mr. Yourdon posted as to the companies that will "make it" are sobering. As he suggested, I would hope people continue to get information, to make intelligent choices...what is so wierd though, is that as one takes in more information and ponders things...they come up with all sorts of plausible calamities. And my personal perception? It will be bad..and I am starting to wonder if the Hamaski's and Infomagic's of the world are not correct...

-- rick shade (Rickoshade@aol.com), May 21, 1999

Answers

Rick,

Because it was a large (900 person) audience (most of whom I couldn't even see, because of the klieg lights shining on the people up on stage), and because I thought that the various panelists (from the Fed, FDIC, Social Security, power company, phone company, bank, etc.) would be able to answer "hard" questions from the audience, I gave the "mild" version of my usual Y2K presentation.

Unfortunately, each of the panelists only got 5 minutes to talk, which is just about enough time to give the traditional "we're working on it, and we're highly confident" speech. And because of the audience size and the limited amount of time, there really wasn't much of an opportunity to ask a whole series of detailed questions of these folks.

By contrast, the community Y2K meetings in my home town usually involve just ONE of the infrastructure providers. They spend 30-60 minutes telling us IN DETAIL what they're doing, and then the audience (which is usually only about 100 people) spend another 30-60 minutes asking very detailed questions. Even this much time isn't enough to "prove" anything, one way or the other, but it does provide a lot more information with which the audience can make a more informed decision.

Having said that, I do want to commend the city of Mobile and its local Y2K group for organizing such a large group of people to get together at one time. All of the companies brought additional specialists, who were available to answer detailed questions, and they provided a lot of literature for people to read, and they all indicated that they were happy for people to contact them with additional questions...

Ed

-- Ed Yourdon (ed@yourdon.com), May 22, 1999.

welcome to the club.

-- a (a@a.a), May 22, 1999.

Ed- Wanna come to Vermont?? Our gov just ordered all the state agencies to make Y2k their computer priority and put other computer projects on the back burner.....(sigh)...That's progress here.....

-- anita (hillsidefarm@drbs.com), May 22, 1999.