Even as many American companies are proclaiming victory over the Year 2000 problem, computer experts, corporate executives and government officials have begun to realize that the greatest risk and biggest challenge of the millennium bug now lie overseas.
In much of the world outside the United States, the response to the millennium bug has been erratic or, in some places, nonexistent, leading the U.S. government to believe that there will be a wide variety of failures in telecommunications, transportation and electric power in spots around the globe.
Although some of these technological meltdowns will barely be felt--just another failure in the daily regimen of electronic malfunctions--others threaten to wash up on American shores in the form of spot shortages and price jumps, or even a mild recession.
In a world of interconnected computer networks, the reality is that no nation is an island. Every domestic economy is a piece of the worldwide network. The interconnections of politics, economics and culture through the myriad electronic networks that have spread in the last few decades have made the Y2K problem a truly global issue.
The computer glitch is perfectly matched to the last years of the millennium--a time when the world is moving toward an increasingly global economy in which geographic borders mean little and the sense of time and distance is being erased through tightly woven technology.
"The biggest problem with the Year 2000 is not all the worries about Jan. 1 and people buying groceries or generators in the United States, but all the companies with dependencies around the world and all the countries that could see serious problems," said Lou Marcoccio, the Y2K research director for GartnerGroup, an information technology consulting firm.
The interconnections touch mammoth "just-in-time" manufacturing firms that depend on suppliers around the world, as well as small-time investors who cringe at every burp in the distant Russian economy.
Banking, shipping, energy, aviation and communications are some of the key components of global interconnection that are critical to both developing and high-tech nations.
Across the sprawling operations of the Ford Motor Co., for example, managers have spent the better part of two years trying to understand all the connections between them and their 20,000 suppliers spread around the world. On Ford's assembly line, where some parts arrive just an hour or two before they are used, a failure by any of the 1,700 suppliers of car parts has the potential to disrupt the line.
