The questions are:
how many is a few?
and how will the problem affect them?

We do know that some companies will try to fix on failure.  The problem with this approach is that some businesses will not be able to survive after the failure, before the fix; or for long after the fix.

The vast majority of industries have already applied corrections.  Still, some percentage of those corrections may fail. The rate of failures will vary across industry groups and across political borders.

We can't know the absolute extent of the problem at this time. If we had begun work on the problem 10 years ago, we might have.  We have now reached the point in time in which it serves little purpose to cast about for recriminations.  If everything goes well, then well; but, if things go badly, blaming individuals or groups will serve no productive purpose.

Later, there will be time to study the issue of why things went the way they did, and how we could do it better in the future.
 
During any stressful time it is important to keep a positive approach .  It is important to understand that most people respond courageously and honorably during disasters.
People do tend to pull together.  Acts of civil disobedience are rare in disasters, even as those rare events are reported on and widely broadcast.

It is only when people feel that they have been betrayed, that civil disobedience occurs.
Civil disobedience during disasters is unproductive of any positive end - a pointless cause - that results in harming those who engage in it, and those around them.

We don't know what will happen.  The best, most intelligent thing we can say is that we believe that most major industries and most industrial countries will be largely unaffected.   This is the "official" view.

Financial institutions and all major corporations have been taking the problem seriously.
Despite the fact that total costs to remediate the problem are large, they have been spread out among industries and over years.  The cost to remediate the bug is not an economically harmful expense to most major industries.  And in major industries those costs have already largely been paid.

The United States Government has more  legacy computers, computer software and hardware than any five governments in the world, yet it spent around  9 Billion  Dollars in five years to fix it's Y2K problem, out of a budget of  around 6,000 Billion Dollars that was spent in those years.

We do know enough about the problem of remediation to know that there will be some failures.  There are several different types of failures possible with the Year 2000 problem.
Most Y2K problems will be minor.  Some will cause disruptions for companies in industries, but will not affect the industry.  (Some companies will take advantage of their competitors failures and take over a larger market share.)

Most of the problems caused by Y2K failures will occur for a period of time after the New Years.  Some corporations and governments do not like it to be known when they are experiencing a problem.  Some problems, however, can not be hidden.  Disruptions in critical infrastructure are likely to be reported immediately and widely.  Yet, most Y2K related problems will not be reported.

On December 31st companies in some industries will be playing it safe.  They will shut down for a period of time and restart their operations after the New Years celebration, just to make sure.  When they bring their systems back online, they will test them, to see if they can be safely operated.  The operators of our critical infrastructure systems have contingency plans to facilitate the operation of the whole system, if there are break downs in parts of the system.  Yet, there can be failures, that could cause cascading affects through out the whole of a critical infrastructure.  The risk of this kind of failure varies greatly among industries and among nations.

Every day there is some risk of these types of failures.  The risk is very small, but the consequence of the risk is a large enough so that people should take actions to prepare for the possibility.  How much reason we have for preparing, because of the Y2K problem, is unknown; but we do know, that the consequence of risks before us every day, is justification enough for preparedness, without Y2K.

What we at The Disaster Center know is that most families are not prepared for disasters of any type. We are advocates of preparedness, mitigation, response and recovery from all possible disasters.

We invite you to stop by our site at 7 AM EST on New Years Eve day as we monitor the events around the world.  Consider stopping by our chat room and use our message boards to share your observations.

This is our first Global effort to mitigate a potential technological disaster, we hope that this leads to future cooperation around the world.

One of the most important results could be a new unity, which will lead to other global efforts to mitigate technological and natural disaster risks; and greater cooperation for sound technological and environmental development.

Christopher Effgen
The Disaster Center

Happy Holidays,
and a Good New Year