Microsoft yet to fix Y2K problem

By Adam Gifford

People waiting for Microsoft's Bill Gates to come up with a solution for Y2K are waiting in vain.

"There is no silver bullet. It requires people to plan and take prudent measures to be ready," said Microsoft platform integration group director Richard Kaplan.

Microsoft has been criticised in the past for its slow response to the Y2K problems generated by its software, its early assertions Y2K was purely a mainframe and big-system issue, and for its non-standard use of the term "compliant."

Silicon Valley pundit Robert X. Cringely, in his column at www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit19990311.html, spells out the problems with Microsoft's Y2K strategy, and particularly the advice it is giving business customers about upgrading to the latest version of Windows NT.

Mr Cringely said that because of time and risk factors, no prudent IT manager would upgrade to Windows 2000 if it were released this year. That leaves Windows NT 4.0. The most stable version available now is NT 4.0 using Service Pack 3 (SP3).

"Unfortunately, SP3 is not in itself Y2K compliant despite Microsoft's past claims to the contrary. The company has since shipped additional hotfixes [fixes to the Service Pack] that make SP3 sort of Y2K-ready. But sort of isn't good enough, and even Microsoft has recognised that by issuing a new Service Pack specifically for Y2K - SP4," Mr Cringely said.

"The bad news is that SP4 is buggy and there are now so many hotfixes to it that Microsoft is preparing SP5."

Mr Kaplan said he stood by the company's past statements on compliance.

"By and large the personal computer is in pretty good shape - 93 per cent of our products are Y2K ready and of the 7 per cent that aren't, if you use them with four-digit dates, they are in great shape, so I feel comfortable with the statement we made three years ago," he said.

A third of the 93 per cent of "Y2K ready" products are listed on the Microsoft site as "compliant with minor issues" and some of the products which fully meet Microsoft's standard of compliance "may have prerequisite patch or service pack for compliance."

Mr Kaplan said people should still buy other Y2K checking software like Check 2000, which also checks hardware and has comprehensive databases of conflicts with software from lots of vendors.

"We only check Microsoft software. Our competitors said they didn't want us to check on their software.

"We wanted to do a great job supporting Microsoft so there is in-depth checking in there that can check the patch level, the service release level."

He denies that Microsoft has been tardy. "Enterprise customers should be well along in their remediation effort. For small and medium business and consumers, we're ahead of the game. They're just starting to think about it and it's very timely the tools and information are coming out now."

Or not exactly now. You can download from www.microsoft.com/y2k three Excel plug-ins, the Date Fix Wizard, Date Migration Wizard and Date Watch Wizard, to help prepare dates in earlier versions of Excel for moving to Excel 97 for Windows, or for auditing workbooks for 2000.

The Microsoft Y2K Product Analyser, which scans hard drive to create an inventory of Microsoft products, compares it against its compliance guides and identifies when a free software update is needed, won't be available in New Zealand until May or June.

A tool for doing the same check through networks will be in the next release of Systems Management Server 2.0.