And now it's too late. The deadline is upon us and a lot of us are in trouble. It means that the chickens that short-range management bred are coming home to roost. What is important, IMO, is not that the Y2K problem caught the those with the managerial viewpoint napping, but that it was inevitable. The whole managerial viewpoint is one that deals with people and their behavior within organizations.
People bend, and people problems can be resolved through negotiation, mediation, etc.
The Y2K situation, on the other hand, cannot be negotiated into a solution and is absolutely inflexible. I would compare the Y2K situation to the Challenger disaster, where NASA and Thiokol were too responsive to politics and decided to launch even though the engineers were saying not to. The result was a multi-billion dollar explosion. I submit that the Y2K situation is the computer age's Challenger disaster. I am sure that we can all easily call up memories of the TV images that were current then.