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DepartmentsFebruary 17, 1997 |
ednmag.comment
When you hear these shouts of "wolf," don't ignore them, but don't rush into hasty action either.
It's easy for technology pundits to develop a herd mentality. They resound and reinforce each other with their proclamations of im-pending developments and difficulties. The result of this reasoning is that you worry and make plans based on shaky data and hidden motives.
For example, the latest warning from these scholars is about reprogramming older software (the kind that allows only two digits in the "year" field) so that it doesn't crash or yield erroneous answers when 2000 ("00'') appears in a calculation. The press has repeatedly quoted the estimate to fix this problem at $50 billion to $600 billion. Some investigative reporting in the Wall Street Journal found that this estimate came from a single consulting company (one with a vested interest). This company made some incredibly coarse estimates of the number of programs that might have this problem, the possible number of lines of code involved, and the rough cost to fix each suspect piece of code. In other words, this wild guess was unscientific, but it attracted a lot of attention and so gained credibility through repetition.
The effort and cost of correcting the code problem will be significant, but like many other things, they will not be spread evenly among users. Most of the potential problems will be found through fairly straightforward debugging and trapping techniques, a much smaller percentage will be tougher to discover, and a few will be almost impossible to find and fix.
This predicament doesn't mean you should ignore this or similar problems. It does mean that you have to take a reasoned approach, and ask yourself how severe the problem is in your situation. Look at your specific application and the impact of this problem, and then act accordingly.
The track record of these technology seers is only poor to fair. A few years ago, they decried the supposed lack of teaching and, thus, understanding of magnetics technology in the United States. As a result, they proclaimed that US engineering design and competitiveness would suffer in areas such as disk drives, motors, and power supplies. They urged new wide-scale emphasis in these areas.
The reality is that a sufficient number of engineers actually understood or soon learned enough about magnetics to do their projects. Rather than panic, those who needed to know about magnetic fields and cores went back to the books, talked to old-timers, experimented, made mistakes, and worked with vendor application specialists to develop the necessary techniques. The result: Product design is moving forward. A core of specialists provides the needed expertise to others, just as technical experts in other niches support the rest of a design team.
When you hear these shouts of "wolf," don't ignore them, but don't rush into hasty action, either. Look at where the shouters get their facts: Are they based on research and data or on just repeated suppositions? Is everyone affected similarly, or is the impact varied? Do the shouters have a vested interest in the solution to this problem? Plan your response according to what you can substantiate to a reasonable extent. Otherwise, you may find yourself heading full-speed ahead in the wrong direction.
Let me know what you think. Send me your comments via fax at (617) 558-4470 or over the Internet at bill.schweber@cahners.com.
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