Much may depend on the vendor's reputation, and record for addressing Y2K problems, and also on the risk level of one's system application. A hospital life-support system should probably be thoroughly analysed for Y2K compliance, no matter how reputable the hardware and software manufacturers. But one can probably just wait and see if a video game machine is Y2K compliant. We leave it to the reader to determine the fallacy in this reasoning. No one has determined how many resources will be used up dealing with the Millennium Bug.
Estimates are many billions of dollars worldwide.
Neither is anyone able to determine the extent of the problem. Economic Consequences One thing is clear - the millennium bug is in either case a resource hog. And if has been underestimated, then those who have not analysed their systems adequately in preparation for it will suffer greatly - and this suffering may be passed on to the general public. Either way, it is a human and economic problem of significant size, said by The Economist to be the most expensive single technological failure, in constant dollars, of all time. Although one will simply have to deal with whatever the consequences of the millennium bug will be, avoiding data discontinuity problems in computer systems is straightforward.