The limited supply of Year 2000 expertise is rapidly being booked. Firms starting late will find it difficult to secure the services they need and will pay much higher rates. Well, the industry will come up with a fix. While some tools are available to increase the productivity of the convers ion effort, this problem has been explored sufficiently long and is different enough for different environments that it seems highly unlikely that any one solution can be applied universally. Do not confuse the replacement cycle for your office or plant personal computers with your systems replacement cycle.
Few firms replace all their systems in ten, let alone three years.
The Year 2000 problem is not language specific. It may be encountered in programs written in most languages. Every software program that stores or recalls these data will also have to be converted. Finding all the programs that access the data and coordinating the needed changes can be a major task. I guess we've left it too late.