Just to remind, optmists and pessimists have both been wrong.
Compliments of Central Predicting:
Famous (Bad) Predictions
"Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?"
--H.M. Warner, Warner Brothers, 1927.
"I'm just glad it'll be Clark Gable who's falling on his face and not
Gary Cooper."
--Gary Cooper on his decision not to take the leading role in "Gone
With The Wind."
"A cookie store is a bad idea. Besides, the market research reports
say America likes crispy cookies, not soft and chewy cookies like you
make."
--Response to Debbi Fields' idea of starting Mrs. Fields' Cookies.
"We don't like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out."
--Decca Recording Co. rejecting the Beatles, 1962.
"Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.
--Lord Kelvin, president, Royal Society, 1895.
"Drill for oil? You mean drill into the ground to try and find oil?
You're crazy!
--Drillers who Edwin L. Drake tried to enlist to his project to drill
for oil in 1859.
"Professor Goddard does not know the relation between action and
reaction and the need to have something better than a vacum against
which to react. He seems to lack the basic knowledge ladled out daily
in high schools.
--1921 New York Times editorial about Robert Goddard's revolutionary
rocket work.
"Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau...
--Irving Fisher, Professor of Economics, Yale University, 1929.
"Airplanes are interesting toys but of no military value.
--Marechal Ferdinand Foch, Professor of Strategy, Ecol Superieure de
Guerre.
"Everything that can be invented has been invented.
--Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. Office of Patents, 1899.
"Louis Pasteur's theory of germs is ridiculous fiction".
--Pierre Pachet, Professor of Physiology at Toulouse, 1872
"The abdomen, the chest, and the brain will forever be shut from the
intrusion of the wise and humane surgeon".
--Sir John Eric Ericksen, British surgeon, appointed Surgeon-
Exraordinary to Queen Victoria 1873.
"If I had thought about it, I wouldn't have done the experiment. The
literature was full of examples that said you can't do this."
--Spencer Silver on the work that led to the unique adhesives for 3-M
"Post-It" Notepads.
"But what ... is it good for?"
--Engineer at the Advanced Computing Systems Division of IBM, 1968,
commenting on the microchip.
"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.
--Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment
Corp., 1977
"This telephone has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered
as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to
us.
--Western Union internal memo, 1876.
"The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who would
pay for a message sent to nobody in particular?"
--David Sarnoff's associates in response to his urgings for
investment in the radio in the 1920s.
"Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons."
--Popular Mechanics, forecasting the relentless march of science,
1949
"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."
--Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943
"I have traveled the length and breadth of this country and walked
with the best people, and I can assure you that data processing is a
fad that won't last out the year."
--The editor in charge of business books for Prentice Hall, 1957
"The concept is interesting and well-fomed, but in order to earn
better than a C, the idea must be feasible."
--A Yale University management professor in response to Fred Smith's
paper proposing reliable overnight delivery service. (Smith went on
to found Federal Epress Corp.)
"So we went to Atari and said, 'Hey, we've got this amazing thing,
even built with some of your parts, and what do you think about
funding us? Or we'll give it to you. We just want to do it. Pay our
salary, we'll come work for you.' And they said, 'No.' So then e went
to Hewlett-Packard, and they said, 'Hey, we don't need you. You
haven't got through college yet.
--Apple Computer Inc. founder Steve Jobs on attempts tc get Atari and
H-P interested in his and Steve Wo.niak's personal computer.
"You want to have consistent and uniform muscle development across
all of your muscles? It can't be done. It's just a fact of life. You
just have to accept inconsistent muscle development as an unalterable
condition of weight training.
--Response to Arthur Jones, who solved the "unsolvable" problem by
inventing Nautilus.
640K ought to be enough for anybody.
-- Bill Gates, President of Microsoft, 1981
-- Mr. Decker (kcdecker@worldnet.att.net), July 19, 1999.
What I think is so instructive about what happened with the Titanic
is how, at not one but several points, a different action could have
resulted in less deaths. Here's an excerpt from an article written in
1998 about the Titanic and about Y2K. The compliance figures are, of
course, dated, but the examples of multiple errors that were made--
anyone one of which could have mitigated the loss of life--are worth
reading...
[Fair Use: For Educational/Research Purposes Only]
http://www.year2000.com/archive/wreid1.html
THE YEAR 2000 TITAN
By Warren S. Reid
Because of the blockbuster movie, much is being said about the ill-
fated inaugural voyage of the Titanic, which sank in the North
Atlantic in 1912.
Here we had the technological marvel of its age, the largest, most
luxurious ship built up to that time -- the unsinkable Titanic.
Still, on the night of April 14, 1912, the Titanic struck an iceberg
and sank in the unforgiving and icy waters of the North Atlantic,
claiming 1,523 of her passengers. The ship traveled with a mere 20
lifeboats. The 20th century was still new, and yet there was an
unreasonable, almost unquestioned acceptance of new technology and
its ability to make life easier and better.
Just How Unsinkable Was the Titanic?
Going beyond the Titanic's hype, we know that some ships built even
50 years earlier were, in fact, much stronger and more unsinkable.
Ships such as the Great Eastern, a mammoth liner, had a double hull,
higher bulkheads, two longitudinal as well as 15 latitudinal
bulkheads, which together made as many as 45-50 watertight
compartments; furthermore, these bulkheads had no doors in them.
The Titanic on the other hand, had only a single hull, so there would
be more space available for the first-class passenger amenities.
There were only latitudinal watertight bulkheads, 15 in all for the
entire ship (yielding 16 compartments). The bulkhead tops were
comparatively lower then Great Eastern's. There were also doors in
many of these bulkheads, to allow waiters and valets quicker access
to their charges. (It is important to note that many of these doors
were opened as the ship was sinking, in order to allow the pumps to
work, but also allowing even more water in as a result).
What is most interesting about the Titanic are the lessons learned
from this tragedy, and how these can help us to better prepare us for
the Year 2000 Computer Crises. The catastrophe of the Titanic was not
so much in its sinking, as it was in the loss of well over 1,500
innocent lives.
Objectives
I believe the catastrophe could have been avoided at three different
times:
* Before the ship struck the iceberg;
* After the ship struck the iceberg, but was still afloat;
* After the ship sank.
Like the Titanic, the year 2000 crisis also has three different
points in time of avoidance or minimization of catastrophic results:
* Now (i.e., before the first waves of Year 2000 failures occur);
* On Jan. 1, 2000;
* And during the 18-24 months after that date.
During each of these time frames, it is possible to minimize the
potential disastrous impact of y2k on your organizations and our
lives; it is important to realize that the damage will be worse the
longer you wait.
In this article, I hope to allow you and me to peer into the terrible
yet avoidable circumstances and mistakes that caused the Titanic
cataclysm, so that you may better navigate similar icebergs on your
own Year 2000 horizon -- and steer clear.
I will attempt to ferret out the hype and myth from the reality
surrounding these calamities. Lastly, I will present a series of
"icebergs" that your "Corporate Year 2000 Ship" must skipper in order
to weather the Year 2000 storm.
I believe that while most of the iceberg lies hidden underwater, and
big chunks of "ice" may fall in your path at any time, knowing where
the potential dangers lie and what you can do about it should help
you better steer your course, stay afloat, and allow you to reach
your destination.
***********************************************
Before the crash
Before the Titanic ever struck the iceberg, it had received a total
of seven iceberg warnings from other ships' wires. These warnings
(all coming within 24 hours of the event), indicated that the
Titanic's particular route posed abnormally high risks, due to an
exceptionally cold winter and the presence of atypical ice flows.
The last warning was not even delivered to the ship's captain, so he
wouldn't be disturbed while entertaining passengers. These risks were
ignored and not managed.
So too, many executives and even CIOs have ignored the press, and
consistent warnings of impending doom from industry pundits, experts,
television, magazines, radio, video tapes, conferences, newspapers,
my son's Junior High school newspaper -- almost everywhere. In 1998,
some of the early failures have become popularized and related to
false expirations of loans, magazine subscriptions, credit cards,
etc.
However, most companies still do not believe that this crisis will
affect them, or are otherwise paralyzed from moving. Numerous
respectable surveys show that fewer than 15% of all companies in the
United States are beyond the awareness and planning phases!
It is simply too late to first become aware and plan for Y2k in mid-
1998. The only hope (the only possible "silver bullet") will be
contingency plans that will allow companies to muddle through in the
year 2000 and 2001, while they get the rest of their act together.
There still are some who claim that it is a "non-event", meant to
create work for consultants and lawyers. Unbelievably, there are
others who are convinced Bill Gates will not let the industry sink
and that he will provide the silver bullet at the last moment.
A psychological attitude of massiveness, safety, and pleasure in the
day's activities pervaded the Titanic and its passengers. No real
thought was ever given to the possibility of tragedy or other common
maritime calamity.
Many, if not most, company executives today still believe "It cannot
happen to us", or "how hard can it be?" The mix of "unsinkability"
still is alive within such companies. They believe computers have
always worked even though they frequently had some problems. Staff or
consultants always have been able to address those problems, even in
production.
This denial of the reality and immensity of the year 2000 problem --
and its ability to impact all systems, PCs, embedded chips,
telecommunications and infrastructure -- is simply denied.
No boat drills ever took place on the Titanic that would have allowed
the passengers and crew to practice the procedures to follow in the
event of a crash or need to evacuate.
Likewise, virtually no companies as of today have a fully documented,
tested, and communicated contingency plan that outlines the steps,
procedures, logistics, systems, and people necessary to keep the
company going in the event that mission-critical systems are severely
impacted or are not Year 2000-compliant in time.
Trying to decide if a ship is sinking is clearly not the best time to
strategize and execute a plan! The Titanic carried only 20 lifeboats
(including four smaller inflatable lifeboats). These lifeboats, even
if fully loaded, couldn't hold 50% of the passengers. That's NOT a
contingency plan! However if the ship is "unsinkable," why worry?
You worry because with so much at stake, it is critical to plan for
the unexpected! Yet many companies today are afraid or unwilling to
accept that the Year 2000 fix can, and in many cases, will require
huge resources in dollars, outsourcing, facilities, tools,
management, planning, doubling up staff to implement concurrent
contingency plans and remediation efforts.
For instance, why are some more progressive banks and companies
budgeting $250 million to $500 million while other similarly situated
companies are budgeting only $20 million to $40 million? Which group
is heading for the Y2K iceberg?
The Titanic's crew was not privy to the evacuation/load performance
test results before the ship was launched. These tests, performed
months earlier, proved that the Titanic's lifeboats (based on the
Titanic's mechanics, divots and lowering units) could be safely and
fully loaded (60-65 persons) before lowering away. This becomes
terribly important later when in fact the crew ordered several boats
to lower away half loaded (or less), for fear that the boats might
otherwise break off and crash into the sea.
Just how many test results, and systems and operations limitations
are being communicated today to company users and operators of
systems, so that they will fully appreciate the limits they can
expect from their systems when Year 2000 comes?
A nearby ship, the Californian, within line of sight (approximately
16 miles away), actually tried to send a message to the Titanic to
alert it, prior to the time it stuck the iceberg. The Titanic's own
wireless office, in a very atypical message, replied "Shut-up, shut-
up" and wouldn't accept the message.
The Titanic's operators were sending greetings from its passengers to
the shore and did not want to be disturbed. The Californian's
wireless operator then went to sleep, which was normal in the year
1912 (there was no requirement for a 24-hour wireless monitor). The
Californian did not realize the Titanic was in trouble until several
hours after the Titanic sank and the Carpathia was finishing
retrieving survivors.
This parallel to the Year 2000 crisis is striking. At first many CIOs
clamored for board of directors support, but many boards would not or
did not want to hear to hear bad news, high-impact problems and
requests for crushing budgets. Now, however, boards are clamoring for
more information about the Year 2000 icebergs but the CIOs,
technologists, and consultants have yet to finish accurate and
complete assessments. Who is asleep now?
Afloat after the crash
After the Titanic first struck the iceberg, she sank within a couple
of hours. Frantic calls for help were responded to by many, but the
nearest responding ship was almost five hours away. By then,
approximately 1,500 passengers would freeze to death (not drown) in
the North Atlantic waters waiting for rescue.
Unfortunately, the Californian was asleep at the wheel with an
unattended radio and provided no help and saved no lives.
As of Mid-1998, more than 50% of companies surveyed by prestigious
pollsters and researchers including Andersen Consulting, Howard
Rubin, Capers Jones, the Gartner Group and others have not even
completed their Y2K assessment phase.
Frantic calls for help to overworked consultants (who are unable to
give guarantees in any event) have created backlogs of requests. The
Big 6 accounting firms announced in July 1998 that they are all
getting out of the Year 2000 remediation business because of time
constraints, staffing conflicts (one said Y2K "work is boring and
provides no growth for its staff"), and potential litigation.
In some industries such as entertainment, competitors are actually
joining forces to help each other share systems solutions. Similarly,
companies in the securities industry are also participating in
cooperative efforts. Yet, in many cases even if you can get help, it
will be too late to make the Jan. 1, 2000, cut-off date.
Thus contingency and degraded interim systems will have to be
employed to keep the organization afloat and alive until the real
remediation systems (the rescue ships) arrive.
The Titanic was unprepared for the disaster. Because of the lack of
testing and communication, many passengers were at first instructed
to go down to "B-deck" to board the lifeboats. After herding them
down, the captain realized that the boats must launch from "A-deck"
because of recent glass paneling enclosures that were put in to keep
passengers warmer. They all had to return to "A-deck" from where the
lifeboats were actually launched - after losing precious time.
Many companies are still losing precious time trying to determine
what the best tool or methodology is to launch their assessment and
remediation efforts. These companies should just settle on one of the
better tools in each category (scanners, parsers, capture playback
tools, test bed and test suite tools, test data generators and
comparators) and get started!
Some start, then change, and then change again. No one vendor has the
corner on the market. And no one tool will do it all. So start now
and get the benefits that each can bring by automating some of the
process, now!
The belief of "unsinkability" proved to be a continuing problem on
the Titanic as well. When the ship struck the iceberg, passengers
exhibited no fear, sought no haste, and gave no importance to the
incident -- still believing the ship "unsinkable." This false belief
proved even deadlier as time went on, because passengers refused to
board the lifeboats. They exclaimed, "Why risk our lives in the cold
and freezing Atlantic adrift in a tiny dark lifeboat, when we are
already on this warm and safe 'unsinkable' ship?" The belief in the
ship's hype, and the disbelief that such a tragedy could happen to
oneself personally, cost many lives.
The later it gets the more some companies today believe that they
missed the boat and become further paralyzed. Get off it! Do what you
can now! Sell off parts of your business if you must. Simplify your
product lines; outsource certain capabilities; change the fundamental
way you do business to buy time while remediating your systems. The
key is to save as many of your company's assets, customers,
suppliers, contracts, relationships, competitive advantage situations
as possible, until the time the remediated or replacement systems
become available.
Ad hoc and unrehearsed plans also caused loss of life on the Titanic.
For instance, the crews on the half-empty lifeboats (that were
lowered prematurely for fear of toppling the boat during lowering)
were instructed (ordered) to immediately row to one of several
designated gangplanks to pick up more of the passengers to fill the
life boats.
Testimony shows that no single passenger was picked up from a
gangplank once the boats were lowered. The lifeboat survivors, afraid
of being swamped by others, continued to move away from the sinking
Titanic. The inter-dependency of each group to the other in the chain
was broken; the main crew, the staff lowering the lifeboats, the
crews in the lifeboats, the passengers remaining on the ship and the
panicked passengers in the water never really appreciated their inter-
dependency -- and their need to work together -- costing yet more
lives.
Other important rules were not followed, or not known. The starboard
side crew followed a "women and children first" rule, allowing male
passengers on to a lifeboat that had available space when no more
women or children were available. The port side crew, however,
practiced a "women and children only" rule. This meant that, on the
port side, once a wife and child got into a lifeboat, even if there
was still room left and the husband or an older brother were ready
and waiting, they would not be allowed to board the lifeboat.
I see a similar misapplication of corporate and information
technology rules such as the "triage rule." This rule usually calls
for: (1) mission-critical applications and utilities to be worked on
first, (2) other less critical systems to deferred temporarily, and
(3) still others to be abandoned altogether. With time running out,
however, many companies are only planning time and resources for the
first group.
But, the truth is that time must also be spent on working with the
less-important systems to assure that these don't inadvertently
corrupt the "fixed system" with bad or ambiguous dates. Importantly,
systems that will be abandoned must be stopped in a planned and
careful manner so that their former users can still get their work
done without these systems. Just think how your work day would be
affected if I took some of your desktop systems away on Jan. 1, 2000,
without warning, re-training, or giving you other means to get the
tools, data and information you need to do your job.
The Titanic sank with only 12 square feet of its total area damaged
by the iceberg (a few inches wide but for some 200 feet long). So
little was ruptured, significantly less than 1% -- but in all the
"right" places! Had the Titanic struck the iceberg 15 seconds earlier
or 15 seconds later, some experts say catastrophe very likely would
have been avoided. Moments earlier, an impact would have allowed the
Titanic to strike the iceberg head-on and likely would have resulted
in flooding to only 1 or 2 compartments at most. An impact 15 seconds
later would have hit the ship further back (or almost not at all) and
destroyed at most 3 bulkheads (or 4 watertight compartments) -- a
rupture the Titanic could have withstood.
The Year 2000 project is an insidious bug requiring meticulous
remediation. In systems that handle thousands or millions of
transactions per day (or more) even a less-than-1% error can mean
hundreds, thousands or even more errors made daily. If you are
"lucky," your systems will fail fully so that at least you know you
have a problem. If you are not so "lucky" it will take longer for
your files to be corrupted slowly. Rebuilding them can be a mammoth
effort in many environments.
After the ship sank
All of the lifeboats except one refused to return to help other
passengers in the freezing water onto their lifeboats, for fear of
capsizing their small vessels. Only six passengers of the 1,500 in
the water were saved in this manner. Most survivors lived with that
guilt for the rest of their lives.
The Year 2000 analogy again is that not enough companies are
assisting or otherwise obtaining compliance assurances from their
partners, to guarantee the ongoing flow of goods, supplies, services
and money. A company cannot just sail forward into the sunset on its
own. It must stay/go back, and carry along with it those other
critical organizations that allow it to continue to survive and
thrive. It must share its Y2K plans, know-how, secrets, staff,
resources with those partners that are not as far along or are unable
to do it on their own. What good is surviving if your suppliers can
no longer supply you, or your vendors are out of business? What if
your customers can't pay because of non-compliant systems that don't
allow them to collect their own receivables? What if you lack your
key contracts? We can only survive if we help others, and stay in
synchronization with their solutions and challenges.
It seems that just as the lifeboats never returned to pick up
passengers, we in management and information technology are not
learning from our mistakes, either. We seem not to have learned that
virtually all non-trivial systems fail and have "bugs." We seem to
have forgotten that it always takes longer to develop a system than
we originally plan.
More than 80% of all large projects are either behind schedule, over-
budget, or lack intended functionality. We forget that new
technologies and tools themselves contain "bugs" and errors, and
oftentimes a high learning curve. We forget that our "fixes" will
introduce still new errors. (Like in Russian Roulette, changes made
to short 50-line program modules typically result in one out of six
of those modules having a new error introduced during the correction
process.)
Lastly, according to international maritime rule in 1912, rockets
fired high up into the air that burst and came apart like "flying
candles," constituted signals for help that must not go ignored. For
reasons that are still unclear (after their testimony at the
subsequent hearings), the Californian misinterpreted those rockets as
"party rockets" and therefore never came to the aid of the Titanic.
It is unclear what boards and management must be thinking by ignoring
the SEC rules and requirements to adequately disclose Year 2000
problems and efforts in 10K, 10Q, and 8K filings. Most companies
included dismal boilerplate disclosures, or half-disclosures, or no
disclosure within their March 1998 SEC filings. Ignoring truthful --
even potentially blockbuster disclosures -- won't stop the fireworks;
instead, it will more likely blow up in their faces and potentially
lead to more litigation, more jobs lost, and more lost investments.
There's a lot that can be learned, about the hype of unsinkability
and infallibility, but it's not consistent with history. And those
who refuse to learn from history, are doomed to relive it.
In another look at the "women first" lesson, it is still amazing to
me that most companies who are developing plans and budgets still
have not adopted and communicated standards, methodologies, and a
project office that they intend to follow throughout the year 2000
remediation, including techniques and procedures for developing and
testing contingency plans.
With no well-developed and/or well-communicated directives and
standards in place, different solutions implemented throughout the
company may never work together, and will cost much more in dollars.
***************************
[snip to end]
-- Linkmeister (link@librarian.edu), July 20, 1999.