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Microsoft’s January 22nd announcement of relatively poor financial performance, together with the news of the first job cuts for the firm in its 34-year history has added to the gloom already felt on Wall Street. At least the Seattle giant has no retail stores trading under its own brand name. The sight of a once shiny, beige “Microsoft Windows Store” standing meekly shuttered in between a closed Whittards and a Woolworths might please the occasional passing alliterative MacFan but frankly we could do without the extra empty real estate.

Before assuming however that Microsoft is just the latest to be infected by the dreaded Downturn virus (a nasty worm that exploits unpatched Securities Exchange Commission holes, deletes wealth and then spreads rapidly through the banking system), it is worth considering a few other facts.

Microsoft’s January 22nd announcement stated “Client revenue declined 8% as a result of PC market weakness and a continued shift to lower priced netbooks”. While for Balmer and Co. the movement toward netbooks might have proven to be an unfortunate trend it is worth reminding ourselves that it is one that is neither wholly unexpected nor is it necessarily undesirable.

All throughout 2008 enterprises looked at their IT estates in light of worsening economic conditions, and also with a newly minted concern for the electricity consumption of the desktop and server environment. In common with our Industry Analyst peers, Quocirca has regularly pointed toward the need for a re-examination of the hardware choices in the office environment, especially in light of emerging computing architectures such as SaaS and Cloud.

Quocirca’s advice continues to be that corporations should look to sweat the hardware assets already deployed if you are simply looking to defer the expense of replacement. Extending the life of the existing desktop estate also allows enterprises to focus further on best-practice asset management of the IT assets they have. It is becoming mainstream for enterprises to not only focus on effective remote management of the software stack across the office environment, but also active management of the power state of the devices. The financial savings resulting from turning off and sleeping existing desktop machines can be substantial – not to mention the very real benefit of lowered GHG emissions that comes with reducing electricity consumption.

In environmental terms, there is certainly an argument to be made that newer machines are computationally more powerful and less power hungry than older models. However as the embodied CO2 and ecological footprint of neither the existing machine nor the potential replacement model is easily and accurately calculated, it is difficult to say whether there is a net environmental benefit in replacing an existing equipment or otherwise. As long as the existing desktop kit is relatively young, then active power management of the device estate will probably yield as much benefit in electricity savings as implementing newer devices, while completely avoiding the environmental burden of the embodied footprint inherent in rolling out a newer fleet.

If you do wish to replace the desktop hardware, power consumption of the hardware during its lifetime needs to be a consideration in the selection. A PC/Laptop on every desk might have been an incredibly lucrative market for Microsoft’s OS/Office combination but its suitability is questionable in terms of consumed computing power out for every watt of electricity in. Netbooks generally use less electricity in the use phase. Being less capable than PC/laptops they are inherently also simpler devices, and it is possible (though not necessarily guaranteed) that the embodied carbon footprint of the device will be less than a fully featured alternative.

Meanwhile, it has been fairly common advice from industry watchers that enterprises should reconsider whether they will continue to need a computationally powerful, and power hungry desktop machine estate at all. Sure, a newer like-for-like device is almost certainly more powerful than the old, but do you need the extra horsepower? If a significant proportion of your application environment is today (or is planned to be) web based then traditional PC/laptop hardware is perhaps a poor choice.

Newer computing architectures shift the major processing demands back away from the desktop. The increasing desire for computing mobility, so well served during the last decade by laptops, is arguably better served today through storage of data in the cloud from where it can be accessed via a browser from whichever device suits wherever you are and whatever you’re doing.

From a security point of view, the large attack surface of a traditional desktop (or laptop) device has also continued to present an expensive and complex set of problems for enterprises. A blocked service might be a shut down service, but an absent service is one that is utterly closed off to potential attack. It may be better therefore to implement a desktop environment that doesn’t need so many software services to be patched/filtered/blocked, thus reducing the attack surface straight out of the box.

Netbooks are, as Microsoft seems to have discovered to their loss, a natural candidate for consideration to meet all these needs. The corporation’s disappointing financial results paired with their willingness to place some of the blame on the rise of such devices speaks volumes about the company’s weak position vis-à-vis having an effective strategy as computing requirements change. Difficult trading conditions during the lead up to the (now official) recession have certainly played a part. However it is arguable that the macro economic factors have merely been the accelerant that has flared an existing fire rather than being a new conflagration burning through Microsoft’s wealth.

Welcome to today…now where does Microsoft go from here?

Its becoming more and more common for retail shoppers to consider the providence of the fresh and packaged food they buy. From Fairtrade chocolate to Free Range chickens to Organic vegetables it is obvious that consumers have an increasing awareness of the importance of the upstream supply chain, and the methods and ethics applied in the manufacturing of the goods they purchase. In addition to the organic and Fairtrade labels, more and more attention is also now being given to “local” sourcing. Arguably this is a return to the traditional rather than an entirely new phenomena. In years gone by the choice of produce that was grown within a ten mile radius was more a reflection of what was on offer, rather than a deliberate lifestyle choice. Now however, it is being recognised that economically and environmentally, it makes sense to purchase products that are grown and manufactured in the local region.

Outside of the kitchen we use high-falutin’ terms like “long tail, highly distributed supply chains” to refer to the process of sourcing the components that go into various manufactured goods from a range of different countries, the shipping back and forth during the build phase, and the eventual shipping of the finished product to a distant market. All that shipping around the place adds to the environmental footprint of a manufactured product - potentially adding another two and half sizes to the existing environmental footprint of a product, no matter how careful is the thought that goes into the product design and component choices.

In the data centre and across the office computing estate it will become increasingly important to focus on the embodied environmental footprint of the product. Right now most of the industry noise is on the energy consumption during the in-use phase of the product’s life. However where a product is designed and built and from what components, and how it is packaged and shipped will increasingly become a consideration as the buyers of IT equipment become more sophisticated in their understanding of the true meaning of “sustainability”.

It’s worth it therefore to consider the credentials of local, specialised PC and Server manufacturers. All other things being equal (price, performance, reliability, warranty and other features) a locally built and sourced item of hardware may well turn out to be a better choice in overall sustainability terms. While no-one ever got fired for buying Lenovo/Dell/HP/etc, it may just be a smarter choice to look beyond the usual crop of 800 pound gorilla box shippers.

Shop local…live light…