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Microsoft has been saying that its products are compliant. Now the company admits that it has alienated customers. Perhaps it's time to resurrect Mark Twain's quip: "Rumors about my compliance have been greatly exaggerated."
This story is from COMPUTERWORLD (Jan. 22).
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Microsoft's Year 2000 Resource Center will list information about which of the company's products are compliant, how the products handle dates and how to work around problems. It will also offer tools to help fix individual products.
The announcement, made during a Securities Industry Association year 2000 meeting, also marked Microsoft's first admission that it has "been slow in responding to this issue," said Jason Matusow, Microsoft's year 2000 strategy manager.
Microsoft's inaction on the problem "has been a mistake," Matusow said. Microsoft was "head down, moving along with PC technologies'' and failed to grasp the importance of products' date sensitivity and how critical they are to customers' operations, Matusow said. . . .
In the past, Microsoft told customers that all its products were year 2000-compliant. Those statements were not only inaccurate, they "put a lot of pressure on IT managers who were trying to put together budgets for desktop conversions," Moore said. . . .
Microsoft's product guide will allow users to search for products by name, version number, the software language involved and whether the products are compliant.
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