So we can lie calm in our beds knowing that Y2K is very unlikely to bring the world IT infrastructure crashing down and how do people react? They are disappointed! It's as if catastrophe was preferable to moving on with our mundane, tax-paying, generally unarmed lives. Get ready for the last Y2K column I will ever write, I promise.

So not all that much happened, which is both good and generally along the lines I predicted both in this column and in my Y2K TV special. But don't assume that just because nothing has happened yet that nothing will happen at all. As I've written before, the main Y2K problems aren't with the delivery of services but with the accounting feedback loop that pays for those services. This feedback loop is based on billing cycles, and we haven't really seen any of those yet.

Have you noticed how the only Y2K problems to speak of have taken place at, of all places, video rental stores? This is for a good reason, because the billing cycle for video rentals is usually no more than one to three days long. Whatever Y2K problem took place at the video store, where a guy was charged a $91,000 fee for being 100 years late returning his copy of "Fast Times at Ridgemont High," is likely to be repeated in other businesses that have longer billing cycles. So we'll be hearing stories of huge late fees at the end of the month, the quarter, and probably at the end of the year, too. And just like the late fees at the video store, they'll be obvious and laughable and easily corrected.

That's the easy side of Y2K. There will be other problems that are more significant, but my guess is we'll never hear about them because of corporate pride or national security.

Still, there are people who are upset about Y2K and they fall in two groups. First, there are the folks who were ready for the whole thing to blow and now have to decide what to do with the four tons of wheat they have in nitrogen storage out in the garage. Muffins are nice, I'd say, and bread. After my Y2K special aired, more than 700 of these people sent me e-mails questioning both my sanity and my citizenship. By predicting that Y2K would be no big deal, they told me, I was dooming thousands. IT WAS GOING TO BE ALL MY FAULT. I wrote a column about this and you can find it in the Links of the Week. Interestingly, NOT ONE of these folks who called me names you can't say on PBS has bothered to write back admitting that just maybe they were wrong.

Much more interesting are the people who are P.O.'d that Y2K cost so much. Was it $100 billion or $600 billion? Who knows? The federal government admits to spending more than $8 billion, itself, getting this to work right. Critics cite this as a horrible waste of money. This argument is based either on the idea that we got nothing for the investment or that we spent all this money and Italy, which didn't even have a Y2K committee until early 1999, hardly spent a thing and achieved the same result.

I use Italy only as an example. You can name almost any other country, but I like Italy.

What's important here, though, is that the USA is NOT Italy. Critics argue that we could have done what the Italians did, which was wait until the last minute and buy our Y2K solutions cheaply. But when you are the USA and consume 70 percent of the world's IT products while producing 80 percent, you can't wait for someone else to do the dirty work. There simply is no someone else. The byte stops here.

And that isn't such a bad thing. Notice the numbers above that we consume 70 percent but make 80 percent? The computer industry, especially software and services, makes big bucks for the U.S. This is one area in which we have a strong positive balance of payments. Whatever Y2K fixes Italy bought were generally ones we sold. The global Y2K remediation business was an American business. What's wrong with that?

What's wrong, the critics say, is that we paid too much. How do they decide what is too much? Whether it was $100 billion or $600 billion, can you find anyone who was specifically damaged by Y2K spending? I can't. Stocks still went through the roof. Industrial profits were higher. Productivity increased. More taxes were paid because of more earnings.

Sure, some systems were replaced or eliminated that might have remained. Yes, let's complain about that. Let's complain about all the money spent that we can't feel the loss of — money that was used to make our IT infrastructure more modern, durable, and efficient.

Y2K was a Marshall Plan for IT improvement, helping industry to make the hard decision to modernize. Whether there were any Y2K problems or not, modernization was a good thing. And the results of that modernization will be felt positively for years to come.

And all those Y2K programmers who are now to be thrown out of work? Won't happen. Everyone was so busy fixing Y2K bugs and making infrastructure improvements (repaving the roads, so to speak) that they didn't have time for new product development (designing new cars to go on the new roads). That's what we will turn to now. This will be another great year for IT hiring and even next year, when one might expect a letdown, it won't even be felt because of natural growth.

So nothing bad happened because of Y2K, and a lot of good happened. Sure, there were over-inflated Y2K budgets and the odd PBS special (budget very under-inflated, I can assure you), but there are no victims in this story. I admit to being a little peeved that Year2000.com sold for $10 million and I wasn't the seller (until I learned it was a hoax). Y2K was generally a good thing for America and I am really looking forward to Y3K, aren't you?

"Y2K: The Winter of Our Disconnect?" will be rebroadcast nationally on January 20th with 16 minutes of new material. Check your local listings for the exact broadcast time.