From: Antoine Leca (Antoine10646@leca-marti.org)
Date: Fri Apr 15 2005 - 02:29:25 CST
Michael (michka) Kaplan wrote:
> Back in 1999, I received over 300 pieces of email asking me
[...]
> I finally put up a web page explaining why all of these people are
> basically either stupid or insane
I was one that send about 150 of these letters (but it was in 1998; Oh yes,
I had to send about 120 others in 1999, because the first batch was not
really answered.) I did so because I was required to do so by the lawyers. I
resisted (about 8 months long), because I pretty knew it was insane and
stupid (asking Microsoft from France is as clever as an American asking
President Chirac to do... whatever.) But I finally did it, first because I
was paid for (!), and also because I was told it was part of the "basements"
the lawyers needed in case there were problems, to argue against _others_
(customers, administration) that we really did have make an effort to
address the "problem." As a result, attitude such as yours (no answering)
was better than others (such as answering a stupid letter saying that only
the yet-to-be-released, still-very-buggy, version, could be considered
Y2K-compliant, while the product did not manage dates in any way) from my
point of view, since to me it meant less archiving work. Yet from the
lawyers' point of view, your attitude is less correct.
So you should really view this as part of the drawbacks of the Y2K circus. I
believe that taken as a general thing, Y2K was a BIG benefit for the IT
industry, partly because the marketing-oriented answers of the second case
above sometimes (often?) succeed to deceive customers, yet not _everything_
was pure profit, as we see.
Antoine
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