Where will Microsoft’s green path lead?

Now the software behemoth Microsoft has stepped forward to loudly proclaim its support for the sustainable IT movement. The company’s off to a good start: Beyond a list of notable green credentials already under its belt, Microsoft has a newly appointed chief environmental strategist in Rob Bernard, charged with guiding and promoting the evolution of the company’s green agenda. The company’s newly released server platform Windows Server 2008 is garnering praise for its energy efficiency. The company is even starting to share, for free, its best practices for datacenter management.

By shining a green spotlight on itself, Microsoft is calling attention to the fact that it understands the role that it — and the software and platform industry as a whole — has to play in the complex green-tech ecosystem. What remains to be seen is how that seemingly newfound green religion will manifest itself in future product offerings, particularly, in my mind, with respect to the successor to Vista.

Green in Redmond

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer used the Cebit stage to not only tout the energy-efficiency features loaded in Windows 2008 Server and other Microsoft products; he told the world that the company would soon release a set of best practices for datacenter management, drawing on energy-saving strategies the company has adopted in its own operations. The first set of best practices, in fact, is already available for download.

Microsoft’s interest in green tech has been evident for a while. Beyond the green features the company claims in Vista and Windows 2008 Server, Microsoft was among the first members of The Green Grid, a consortium of high-tech companies looking to holistically address the challenge of curbing power consumption in the datacenter. It’s also a part of the Climate Savers Initiative, which aims to increase energy savings in computers and servers. Moreover, the company reports incorporating green practices in developing its facilities in India and Quincy, Wash. Microsoft also joined forces with the Clinton Foundation last year to develop free software for cities to monitor their carbon emissions.

Even more recently, a new chief environmental strategist, Rob Bernard, came onboard to develop a company-wide green strategy. “We had a lot of well-intentioned and productive work happening around environmental issues, but we recognized that it would be more powerful, and that we’d have the ability to derive impact at scale, if we created a strategy to drive out environmental issues across our product lines, in how we run our business, and in how we think about our partnerships,” Bernard told me.

Greener software pastures

Microsoft’s commitment is critical to the overall greening of the technology landscape. As companies suffer the burden of high energy bills and power limitations, they’re clamoring for higher performance per watt from their machines. While processors, memories, power supplies, and other such hardware components certainly contribute to the amount of energy a machine consumes, software and server platforms play an integral role as well.

For starters, servers and PCs have grown progressively more powerful — and, thus, more energy-hungry — over the years to keep up with the demands of swelling software requirements. Yet some critics argue that many of today’s apps are unnecessarily fat and inefficient, requiring companies running them to invest in more powerful hardware than might otherwise be necessary.

Additionally, software has a role to play in helping rein in the power consumption of servers and PCs, which is a critical part of an overall green IT strategy.

Win some, lose some

Microsoft developers were evidently mindful of the second point when they coded Windows Server 2008 and Vista. As noted by Bjarne Dollerup, senior product planner in the Server and Tools Business Marketing and Solutions Group at Microsoft, “both Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 take steps to address … power consumption by implementing updated support for ACPI processor power management (PPM) features, including support for processor performance states and processor idle sleep states on multiprocessor systems.”

Additionally, Windows Server 2008 boasts plenty of support for virtualization, a strategy for reducing a company’s server count (and energy bill). Improvements to Terminal Services are a boon for thin clients: “More basic terminal hardware and thin clients can be used in placed of complete desktop systems, helping lower costs,” according to the company.

However, Microsoft has arguably stumbled on the green IT path with Vista in terms of the fat code and resulting fat systems requirements of the platform. Yes, Redmond made efforts to improve the power-management capabilities of Vista. Still, the fact remains that Vista has markedly higher system requirements than Windows XP — a painful lesson learned by consumers in 2006 who purchased new PCs with “Windows Vista Capable” stickers, only to find out after Vista was released that said machines could run just the lackluster Home Basic Edition of the OS. (Microsoft is fighting a class-action lawsuit over this issue.)

In other words, most Windows shops facing the likely inevitable move to Vista will have to upgrade their existing PCs to support the OS. Unless these companies are indeed reaping a substantial business benefit from the migration, trading in all those PCs for more powerful, truly Vista-capable ones is a decidedly wasteful exercise.

It will be interesting to see where Microsoft’s green path will lead the company, its partners, its customers — and its products. The fact that the company is working with other vendors through The Green Grid and Climate Savers is advantageous: It means we can expect greater green synergy among Microsoft products and other vendors’ wares. There’s also positive signs that the company will, indeed, make the next version of desktop Windows slimmer (or even modular?).

What would you like to see Microsoft do to demonstrate its commitment to green IT?

Ted Samson is a senior analyst at InfoWorld and author of the Sustainable IT blog. Subscribe to his free weekly Green Tech newsletter.