I've seen previously a total estimate of 800 billion to fix the problem, and assume that was a world-wide cost, probably including hardware, new programming, travel, associated company costs (such as meeting times and general expenses) and backups or other incidentals of "staying in business."

But, the fed's (actually the national media - but what's the difference?) have been recently claiming only 100 billion (?)/200 billion (sometimes)/ or other values, some even less, as they apparently try to minimize the impact of the problem by stressing the amount spent.

What are the people in Mr. K's using as a basis, and what is the actual US, UK, Canada, NZ, or OZ figures?

-- Robert A. Cook, PE (Marietta, GA) (cook.r@csaatl.com), December 09, 1999

Answers

BL... or AL?

Before Lawyers... or After Lawyers?

I recall the $300 billion amount being used recently. Humm. Good question Robert.

Diane

-- Diane J. Squire (sacredspaces@yahoo.com), December 09, 1999.

This assumes the problem is 'fixable'. It's not a technical problem or a management problem, its a social problem, ie. too many people, too much greed and stupidity, and too little time.

Y2K is truly systemic.

-- youtopian (@ .), December 09, 1999.

There's a fuzzy a line between pure remediation (i.e. fixing what you've got) and fixing en passant during upgrading or replacement of old systems (that may not even have been broken!)

Companies/governments could just announce ALL of their recent capital expenditure as "Y2K fixes" to make their figures look better if they wanted. No one's checking.

Anyway, the point isn't how much has been spent. At a global scale, that's just money going round and round. It's how much will be LOST due to people not producing. That's REAL cost, and that's why Fix On Fail should be viewed as nothing short of criminal. :(

-- Servant (public_service@yahoo.com), December 09, 1999.

Robert,

Try this: http://www.comlinks.com/mag/ddates.htm

Capers Jones authors this lengthy paper and also wrote a book about Quantifying Costs. He says $1 trillion would be spent before Y2K. Either Jones is wrong or we have a long way to go yet.

I am not aware of anyone publicly debating him on the issue of costs. Notice these quotes: "The cumulative costs of expanding numeric fields as their capacity is exceeded will erode many of the economic advantages of the use of computers and software. It is obvious that a more permanent general schema must be developed before the maintenance expenses trigger bankruptcy and litigation for hundreds of corporations and even for some governments."

"It is a shocking to consider that many of the economic advantages of the most powerful tools ever created by the human species for holding information will be lost due something as trivial as not setting aside enough room to hold dates or numeric information."

"Nonetheless the future of computing and software over the next 50-year period will be severely disrupted by a series of massive maintenance updates due to inadequate field sizes for dates and numeric information. One by one, current date representation methods will fail, and other numeric data will encounter field size problems as well."

-- earl (ejrobill@pcpostal.com), December 09, 1999.