a lot of the spending may be very hard to judge but definitely had a very real (and mostly positive) impact at the companies I was working at - we spent literally billions in one case but importantly much of that money REMOVED applications from the company (which had over 1200 before the y2k effort - that's 1200 applications which had been written internally by nearly 1000 programmers). So by simplifying the IT efforts, removing many applications, consolidating others and updating nearly every part of the company's infrastructure we also were well positions for the Euro conversion the year before y2k and a major merger. - Shannon Clark