You may think the Year 2000 date problem, or ‘millennium time-bomb’ as it is affectionately known, has been documented to death, but according to UK company Eurosoft Ltd, formerly Parity Plc’s European arm (CI No 3,114), ‘most users’ among the general public are still not aware that their PCs will fall over at the turn of the century. Providing the company can make these tens of thousands of users aware, it hopes to clean up by offering the solution, fix2000, a hardware board and software to fix the problem. Meantime, Anglo-Dutch consumer products giant Unilever Group Plc has trebled to 300mpounds its estimate of the cost to the organization of fixing the problem. Equally importantly, it estimates up to a fifth of its small and medium suppliers will not have fixed the problem by January 1, 2000. The company is likely to drop suppliers that are not compliant, and warns that takeover activity is likely to dry up and many companies will build huge inventories ahead of 2000 to create a buffer.
