Banks and ATMs will be shut down. We hope so. But the National Guard in several states, including California, is seeking additional funding to prepare to handle possible civil disruptions in the early months of 2000. The Canadian Army is doing the same. We take some comfort from the normal processes of free enterprise.
Every problem is a profit opportunity for entrepreneurs who can devise solutions to it.
We count on the self-interest of alert and creative people to drive them to find solutions to our problems. Genuine solutions can be sold for high prices by those first to offer them. Then more and more imitators will rush in to compete with the innovators, and the prices of the solutions will fall. Many software companies have already come up with programs that can fix many systems that are known to have the Y2K bug. The problem is to discover which systems must be fixed, and to do so by an unchangeable deadline.