With all the news about banking and automotive bailouts in the fall, it got me to thinking about following question:

“What if the tech industry needed a bailout?”

What if we were to wake up one Monday morning to the announcement that Microsoft had run out of cash? Would the Federal Government just let the Microsoft monopoly collapse? What if the government bailed out the software and giant, and we suddenly were found ourselves in a situation where the government had a significant ownership stake in the operating system of 88% of the computers in production in homes and business throughout this country and worldwide?

Would you be ok with it? Or would you switch operating systems? In your home, that might not be such a daunting task. But try taking a business with 20 Windows workstations and a Small Business Server, with employees who have built work skills and processes around Windows over the years, to Linux and Mac.

Do you believe the U.S. government would abuse the power that it had over your computing environment? Do you believe that the government would eventually divest at a profit and go away, as we’ve been led to believe will happen with the banks? Or do you believe that the government would want to maintain nationalized control of the tech sector, just as many speculate that it wants a permanent nationalized stake in the U.S. banking industry?

What if Google was also out of cash and needed a bailout to stay afloat? How would you feel about a government bailout for Google, resulting in the government having ownership and access to all the data and information that Google has collected over the past ten years?

For IT professionals such as myself, who are tasked with thinking through “What if “ scenarios to build sound disaster recovery and continuity plans for businesses, the “What if the operating systems and productivity tools themselves went away, or needed to be eliminated from the equation?” is one that is quite perplexing.

Send me your thoughts.