A modest proposal for an IT bailout

With so many industries looking for their share of the bailout pie from the federal Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), here's an idea: why not channel some of those hundreds of billions of dollars to the information technology sector?

Think about it. The IT world has plenty of "troubled assets." All those legacy systems out there -- older mainframes, DEC machines, Windows NT and 2000 machines, Windows ME client machines to name a few.

Imagine if the federal government swooped in and bought up all those IT assets, and then the Federal Reserve Board followed with a huge injection of liquidity -- at 0% financing -- for shiny new IT assets.

Everyone can start fresh, building everything back up in a service-oriented architecture way, of course. Imagine the lift that would provide for the economy....

Just kidding, of course. There have been some good approaches and solutions in recent years for converting "troubled" IT assets into more productive assets.  And interesting approaches -- cloud, Web services, SOA, virtualization, open source -- on the horizon for better management of assets or acquisition of new assets.  A lot of innovation -- and when times get tough, innovation goes up. Pressed into finding ways to do a lot more with a lot less, IT and business are rising to the challenge -- without a bailout.