Was Y2K bug the biggest con-trick of the millennium?

HONG KONG, Jan 4: Was the Y2K bug the biggest con-trick of the millennium?

As the last Asian markets to resume trading after the holiday weekend glided glitch-free into the year 2000 on Tuesday, many were, at least, beginning to wonder, says AFP.

Others needed no persuading that all the hullabaloo had been a scam dreamt up by the computer software industry to generate billions of dollars in revenues.

One US consultancy has estimated the global spend on Y2K preparations at up to 600 billion dollars.

Firmly in the sceptics camp was Jon Fowler, spokesman for Australia's Association of Small Businesses.

"The Y2K, as I've been saying for the last six months, is the greatest con trick that was ever foisted upon business, full stop," he said Tuesday as banks and markets down under got back to work.

"That's been proved today because no one's having any problems at all. The amount of money spent on the Y2K and all the bloody money that the government was conned into paying is a bloody disgrace."

Y2K experts had identified small businesses as being among the most vulnerable to problems arising from computers being unable to cope with the switch from 1999 to the year 2000.

But they -- like the world's airlines, banks, and stock and currency markets -- appeared Tuesday to have survived the weekend without so much as a scratch.

But not everyone took Fowler's view that there had never been any real threat from the dreaded bug.

In Tokyo on Tuesday, brokers were sufficiently relieved to have put the millennium meltdown nightmare behind them to celebrate by marking stock prices higher in the face of an overnight fall on Wall Street.

"The market's movement today can be explained by the relief of entering 2000 without a major problem," said Tsuyoshi Segawa, general manager of equity trading at New Japan Securities.

Japan was one of the countries where concern about the bug came close to fever pitch.

Spurred by officially-sanctioned warnings of a potential collapse in food distribution and power networks, many households stockpiled enough cash, food and water to last for weeks.

Those who really got the bug went out and bought camping stoves -- just in case.

Little wonder then that, some of those who helped stoke such fears have found themselves on the defensive.

Late Monday, the White House's Y2K czar John Koskinen formally declared the bug to have been squashed, at least in the United States.

But he also stressed that the appearance over the weekend of small glitches in critical systems even after so much investment and work indicated how overwhelming the problem could have been otherwise.

Microsoft tycoon Bill Gates has made similar remarks -- but cynics might not find that surprising coming from the world's biggest software salesman.

Irish software engineer Ian Butler said he and his colleagues were always on a hiding-to-nothing with the millennium job: damned if they fixed it, damned it they didn't.

"If my efforts of the last 18 months were successful and Y2K is an anti-climax, then I'm part of a giant con. If the worst happens and the lights go out or you can't access your bank account or get your e-mail, then it's my entire fault."