Via Eweek, this piece from Larry Seltzer with the very useful reminder that the experts were wrong on Y2K. And why so much alarmism about Y2K in the first place? While there were some well-meaning people who genuinely thought the sky was going to fall:
Why was there no disaster? It’s really simple. Y2K simply wasn’t
anywhere near as much of a problem as many experts suggested. Looking
back at the scale of the exaggeration, I have to think that there was
an awful lot of lying going on. The motivation—mostly consulting
fees—was all too obvious….…
You certainly couldn’t justify all the money spent on the
straightforward merits. Did all that remediation actually solve serious
Y2K problems? If it did, why didn’t the problems manifest themselves in
serious ways in the unremediated third world? Either the problems were
less frequent or less malignant than advertised. In either case, some
famous consultants misled their clients.
What we all should have argued for at the time was perspective: A
focus on worst-case planning is usually unwarranted. Those who argue
for it hysterically and who belittle those who oppose them aren’t
serving anyone’s interests well. Ironically it also taught us the exact
opposite lesson that the extremists were telling: Far from being
vulnerable because of their interconnectedness, our systems are robust
because of their redundancy and interconnectedness.
As a lawyer, these issues bother me – I think about them a lot. And Y2K really bugged me – a lot of the people raising the Y2K alarm were, after all, lawyers, getting fat on the advisory work that their sky-is-falling claims generated. Remember this the next time you read an article written by a lawyer telling you how risky / dangerous / threatening to your business something is.
I think now that two things were involved. First, I believe that this attitude, this culture of reflexive worst-case expectation, is there in part because it cultivates a high-cost solution for every problem. I don’t think this is necessarily conscious – I just think the institution of fee-based legal advisory work has gotten … accustomed, perhaps, to the model. People have simply developed the expectation that it is their role – we are trained to spot problems (we call them issues to avoid alienating the business people with negative attitude). But surely corporate lawyers, for example, would give different advice if their fees were, for example, contingent on outcome. It sure changed the behaviour of litigators – the modern class action landscape in the US being the best example.
Second, it is simply too often easier for many people to unquestioningly make elaborate preparations for the worst case than it is to reasonably and intelligently assess risk. And why rock the boat, when you are getting paid for your time?