Not sure about the rest of the forum, but i can forsee a lot of business transference from non-compliant to compliant business suppliers. I for one will be asking for some sort of written assurance with an implied threat, where possible I will transfer allegiance to compliant businesses/organisations (if there are any). Of course with any monopolies you're stuffed (whether government or private). My next series of letters will be on that basis. Anyone with me or against the idea?

-- Richard Dale (rdale@figroup.co.uk), September 07, 1998

Answers

I doubt it'll help much. Nobody can give you cast-iron assurances (if you see any they are lies). No business can continue if supply of any critical input resource fails, and those supplies are mostly outside their control (ie they'll be asking the same questions you are and probably getting the same answers).

Best you could hope for is a full disclosure of their Y2K plans and a chance to chat with an on-the-ball technical person. What I expect you'll mostly get is warm fuzzy BS written by PR people and censored by lawyers. At the end of the day, some percentage of Y2K bugs *will* be missed, and some percentage of those *will* prove disastrous.

Small unprepared supliers given a choice between losing custom now or in 2000 will probably choose the latter and lie. Your only hope is that it's probably harder to tell a convincing lie with detail, than to address the problem! I can imagine a conversation like:

Company lawyer: if you say that you might get sued into the ground in 2001 Company director: Maybe, but if I don't I'll be out of business by 1999 anyway.

So, maybe a friendlier approach with no implieed threat may be more revealing, providing you've got a really on-the-ball technical guy to assess what their technical guy says. If you can establish verbal communications (with no paper records) they will probably reveal more.

-- Nigel Arnot (nra@maxwell.ph.kcl.ac.uk), September 07, 1998.