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Microsoft's green strategy emerges

Bill Thompson on March 3, 2008 | 929 Views

Unlike other major players like IBM, Intel and of course Google, Microsoft has been rather quiet about the enviroinmental impact of its products. That seems to be changing, and last week the company's chief environmental strategist Robert Bernard spoke at the recent San Francisco Cleantech Forum.

According to a report on news.com he outlined ways in which Microsoft is using power management features in Vista to reduce electricity consumption, claiming that it can reduce usage from 100W to 3-5W.  More significantly, he described the new energy management features in the just-released Windows Server 2008 and claims that it has 'embedded intelligence to match a given workload with the appropriate amount of energy', implying that power use depends on processing load, which would be an interesting innovation.

The move may be prompted by Microsoft's plans to start building their own massive data centres around the world, or it may just be that they have realised that being green is becoming an important aspect of the market message within the IT industry, but it's welcome nonetheless.

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