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Thinking the Unthinkable about Microsoft

What happens to Microsoft and to Microsoft customers if Al Qaeda explode a "small" nuclear bomb in Redmond?

A couple of things came together to lead to this pretty scary but pretty fundamental question.

I had read some English translation extracts from a recent Bin Laden or colleague broadcast (most of the media assume that the key issue is whether it's him or not. It seems to me that we should also know what he is saying to those who are listening to him) and writing a post to a Microsoft newsgroup describing the excruciating slowness of Office 2003 Help (often 15 seconds to be able to load the TOC). The subsidiary question in my mind was the location of those Help servers.

Part of the Bin Laden message (as I hazily recall it) is that something bigger than 911 is intended. Having had peripheral contact with disaster planning in a past life, the question that arose in my mind was what would happen to Microsoft if a small nuclear device went off in Redmond? The answer to that question is probably straightforward, if very grim, as far as Microsoft employees at that location are concerned.

But the follow up question of what would happen to Microsoft customers if such an attack happened also occurred to me.

OK, morbid, I admit. But what would be the consequences for Microsoft customers and, by implication, the US economy (and other Western economies) if Al Qaeda were successful in exploding such a bomb in Redmond.

How centralized are Microsoft's processes? What would be the effect on product activation? On the Office 2003 online Help? On newsgroups? On future product development?

Does Microsoft have a disaster recovery plan for the kind of scenario that I mention?

No, I don't expect Microsoft to come on this blog and give me all the details. But if they haven't already thought this through, they should. And if the US Government hasn't insisted on some distributed backup plan they too are missing a potentially important risk to the US economy, I think.