Who will be the first to go GREEN?

The industry and certainly Microsoft has started to focus on Green issues. In particular our focus has been targeted on power management, which is where I think that we can have the most to impact the environment with software which puts machines in "sleep" states when they are not being used, optimization of machine utilization so that machines are not sitting idle while new machines are being purchased and there is some level of reporting of how much applications cost to run.

However, being Green means a whole lot more. Are the employees working from home to reduce transportation costs, do they put on transportation with reduces the carbon trace for people that have to come into work and what is happening to all those machines which come to an end-of-life. Finally, how do we report it?

I saw an interesting article this week from Greenpeace which takes some different view points, but ultimately gives Microsoft a good benchmark to go forward. How did we do? Not very well... If fact really badly.. Others are picking up on the story and certainly the stock market is starting to take note.

What can we do to improve? Firstly we have to report what we are doing better and secondly we have to put together a clear roadmap of where we are going.

I think that there is going to be some progress on this, now we have a person responsible for driving these issues forward. For now here is the report...

https://www.greenpeace.org/raw/content/usa/press-center/reports4/greener-electronics-microsoft.pdf

There is also a lot of pressure that needs to be driven at a government level. There is a rumor that Taiwan might phase out of incandescent bulbs https://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9829734-7.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20 .