Most states have Y2K laws, but serious limitations exist. For instance, many governments exempt themselves from liability. "So if you're relying on government systems to run your business, you may have a problem and little recourse," Kramer says.

The one good thing from the technology consumer's perspective is that public companies are regulated by the Securities and Exchange Commission. "So while an outside corporate customer may not be able to sue a vendor, its own shareholders certainly can," says Kramer.

While this is no guarantee for individual business customers, it does mean that most technology vendors will go to great lengths to make sure their products are Y2K compliant. As attorneys Kramer and Zanger say, large public companies have problems of their own to deal with-namely shareholders who will gladly accuse management of being irresponsible if products aren't Y2K compliant and aren't sellable after Jan. 1.

Still, unless a company has an express Y2K warranty from its vendors, it can't expect to prevent downtime due to Y2K failures. "Without an express warranty, it reverts to the standard 90-day warranty, which for any software bought by this point won't cover Y2K problems," says Kramer.

The companies with the most problems aren't the ones that bought software this year. These vendors generally were on top of the Y2K problem by the beginning of the year. Most Y2K-related issues that will emerge will be from companies that purchased licensing agreements in the mid-1990s, says Zanger. And the news hasn't been good for business consumers that have gone to court over those looming problems.

Too Late
Most court and arbitration decisions have sided with vendors. "Basically, the decisions have said if you didn't ask for Y2K warranties back then-it wasn't specifically in the contract from the beginning-then you don't get the warranty now," Zanger says. "Citicorp has spent half a billion dollars over four or five years redoing systems that weren't Y2K-compliance-protected. The bottom line is that if you're a CIO and you're trying to retrofit an old warranty to include Y2K, you're toast."

Apparently, it's not even possible to demand a retrofitted maintenance contract. Intuit was sued for breaches in its Quicken money-management software, and the case was settled with Intuit posting a fix online. Medical Manager was sued for breaches in its Medical Practice Management Software. The case was also settled by the company providing a fix.

A software fix posted on the Web may be just what a company wants-as long as it's fast. The problem is that according to the Federal Y2K Act, the timeliness of delivering a fix isn't specific.

So far, Zanger says, there have been 70 lawsuits, 45 actual cases, but they generally involved specific plaintiffs and weren't class-action suits. And the provisions allowing for class-action suits are getting more severe, according to the new laws. This poses additional problems for business consumers because class-action suits serve one purpose particularly well: There's power in numbers, and class-action suits can light a fire under the vendors that gets them to create fixes more quickly.

But don't bet on it. More than likely, vendors will be offering last- minute magic bullets at top dollar. One example is offered by software vendor SolutionsSoft Inc., which developed a fix for companies that are stuck and don't have time to change any more program logic. The product, called Safety Net 2000, works by using program encapsulation instead of changing the logic. What the software does is revert all 2000 dates to 28 years ago to the date. For example, Jan. 3, 2000, would be read as Jan. 3, 1972. The reason for 28 years instead of any other number is that if it's Tuesday in 2000, it was Tuesday on the same date in 1972. This means that users don't have to change any of their applications. The software uses an input/output bridge-which means the display the user sees shows the date in the present. While it's a good product and can be a viable long-term solution, the downside is that a limited cross-platform license costs $100,000.

So get yourself a new maintenance contract and write a backup plan. That has to be better than spending $100,000-plus on a magic bullet that may not work. And it's the best ammunition you have when the lawyers make their move next January.

Rivka Tadjer is a computer journalist in Santa Monica, Calif. She can be reached at rivkat@mindspring.com.

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