Small Bead Businesses and Y2K

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Small Bead-Businesses and the Y2K (Millenium Bug)

As of the end of July, around 18% percent of small businesses in the US will have problems when the calendar changes to 1 January 2000. That's 1,400,000 of them. I have no statistics for other countries, but in general, Western Europe and Japan are probably worse off, while the rest of the world is not as computerized and doesn't need to worry as much.

With the exception of Colgate-Palmolive and the car companies, larger companies are doing almost nothing to help the small businesses they supply. We have to fend for ourselves. Here are some handy tools.

Y2K Help Center for Small Businesses at the National Institute for Standards and Technologies. You can call them at 1-800-925-5775 (1-800-Y2K-5575) or email them.

At the Small Business Administration site you can down load Power-Point seminars, the NIST Jumpstart Kit and see a webcast of top software vendors discussing problem and solutions.

The Y2K Specialist site is super. It has links to all the major hardware and software makers (scroll down). If you have either that are more than two years old, you should check on your version's Y2K readiness. Software makers, at least, have patches you can download to update the programs. There are scrolling news headlines and even a joke section.

The National Federation of Independent Businesses site let you order a free booklet (scroll down to find it) named "Countdown to 2000" as well as links, the Jumpstart Kit and other information.

The Gordon & Glickson LLC site has compliance statistics and surveys, information on accounting problems, local user group links and government-sponsored best practices. This site also has a scrolling news headline section (with a bad choice of background color).

Source: "Business Year 2000" Computerworld 33:30, p. 45 (26 July 1999). More on the story from the Computerworld web site (see back issues).