Computer giants telling all on Y2K readiness

By Adam Gifford

Major computer companies are finally emerging from the shelter of their legal departments and telling their customers the full story about the year 2000 readiness of their technology.

Senior executives from Microsoft and Hewlett Packard were in New Zealand a week ago to talk about their latest initiatives.

Richard Kaplan, whose position as director of Microsoft's platform integration group puts him in overall charge of the company's Y2K effort, was announcing free tools for customers to identify which of their Microsoft software needs to be replaced or patched.

Hewlett Packard Y2K programme director Clark Straw was here to meet major customers, part of a worldwide effort to talk to the 2000 largest and most critical customers (like nuclear power plants) on their state of readiness.

Mr Kaplan said Microsoft's Y2K strategy was "100 per cent a customer satisfaction issue."

Microsoft was not trying to make money by getting people to upgrade systems or standardise on one version of the Microsoft operating system.

"We want to make sure the customers are Y2K ready. It's not about revenue at all. It's about making sure people have a good experience living through the millennium with their personal computer," he said.

Mr Straw said companies like Hewlett Packard had a more prosaic reason for the new openness - the "good Samaritan" law passed last year by the US Government, and now under consideration by the New Zealand Government.

"There's the feeling it's the right thing to do, but also there is legislation saying you must notify, so we have a legal obligation to do this," Mr Straw said.

Hewlett Packard had tested all its 100,000 products for compliance, not just the 29,000 still shipping. Where issues were identified, patches were created or alternatives identified.

"We are making the commitment to our customers that for any products shipped from January 1, 1995, we will provide an upgrade to make it Y2K compliant. If it is under service contract, that upgrade is free. If not, or it was shipped after January 1, 1997, the upgrade will also be free."

Sales records are being combed so anyone who bought a non-compliant system from HP after January 1995 will be written to. The company is also working with resellers to get the word out to their customers. Details of product status are at www.hp.com/year 2000.

Mr Straw said the visits to the largest customers were both to inform them and to determine how far their Y2K projects had gone, so could make its own contingency plans.

He expected those plans to be tested over the second half of the year, in line with Gartner Group predictions that Y2K-related failures will build up sharply over that period, tailing off gradually during 2000.

In fact, Gartner predicts that only about 10 per cent of the failures will occur during the two-week period around January 1. It also predicts that between 15 and 33 per cent of New Zealand companies will have a mission critical failure.