Not a good sign. These businesses will have to add to their customer service personnel to deal with the inevitable bugs. There will be a need for computer-literate support staff to go over every invoice and billing manually. The Social Security Administration has been working on the problem since 1989 and is ready to begin testing now. It has no back up plan except to audit returns manually.
Blame is hard to fix here.
Certainly we've known about this for a long time, but we are so new to computers that we have no good feel for the life cycle of software. We are accustomed to the rapid advances in hardware and the need to upgrade every two year years or so, but some of the software programs we are using are almost forty years old. None of the programmers who wrote these old programs thought there was a ghost of a chance they would still be doing yeoman service at the turn of the century. Software is a brand new thing in the economy and there aren't many standards yet. A recent issue of Scientific American compared the present state of software development to the state of industrial development before Ely Whitney invented the assembly line in 1799, when everything was made by skilled individuals by hand and each item was unique.