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This short report in a conventional Internet trade journal tells the story of a software executive who is convinced that y2k will cause a degradation in the economy. His personal solution? Gold.
There will be a loss of public faith in computers, he thinks.
My view: there will be a loss of faith in a whole lot more than computers.
This appeared in INTERNETWEEK (Nov. 10).
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I don't know about you," my friend said, laughing nervously, "but I'm putting everything into gold." My friend, a senior executive for one of the world's largest software companies, wasn't worried about the recent stock market crash and rebound cycle. To him, that was small potatoes.
"By next May," he said, "people will really start seeing the effects, and the price of gold will go up." In fact, it wasn't so much the stock market as the world economy that had my friend worried. Instead, he was concerned that the end of the millennium would cause irreparable harm to the world economy-so great that only a position in gold would offset it. . . .
Instead of the world ending in a flash of mangled bits, it will simply degrade. Ultimately, as my friend predicted, the public will lose confidence in computers, in the communications that support them, and in us. In the end, the funding we needed to keep this from happening will go to bookkeepers and customer service temps who will explain that this great degradation in service is our fault, as they fix the problems by hand.
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