Technology and the Environment DD's Eco Notes

In the middle of a quick tour through the EU, visiting customers, government officials, and various environmental NGOs and meetings.

Enjoyed a lively dinner hosted by Richard Barrington, our point man in the UK on sustainability. The group included executives from utilities, government infrastructure, various energy-related startups, other high tech companies, Forum for the Future, and academia. Many of the folks, including Richard on behalf of Sun, participate in the Corporate Leaders Group which represents industry in the overall policy debate.

Dinner topics included:

• Generational differences in attitude towards sustainability, including whether or not the current college-age generation has internalized sustainability as it relates to their personal responsibility
• Relationship of innovation, technology and sustainability, and how policy can be a catalyst for innovation vs. a deterrent
• Effectively driving change, with the relative merits and effectiveness of bottoms up voluntary change v. top down policy or rules (general conclusion: we should keep encouraging bottoms-up change, but the risks are too high and time is too short to rely solely on it)
• Ineffectiveness of traditional economic analysis to effectively measure the return or guide investments related to decisions which include an environmental component
• Potential for telepresence technologies (such as our iWork activity inside Sun) to offset the some of the needs for commuting, business travel, etc
• Unsustainability of our current PC-centric model, and potential for thin clients. I was pleasantly surprised by the consistent interest in thin clients and Sun's SunRay technology in the UK. I suspect I'm going to be writing more about this in the future.
• Miserable showing by the US in last weekend's Ryder Cup. I suggested that we suspend the Ryder Cup indefinitely given the environmental folly of flying dozens of people overseas for a golf match, but the rest of the folks at the table relished the results too much to agree

Finally, my day coincided with Gordon Brown, the Labour Party's candidate for Prime Minister, announcing that the environment will be a centerpiece of his campaign. Most of the people I talked to expect the election to be a true three-party race, and that each will try to outdo the other on environmental issues. This should be an interesting election to watch, and may a preview of what to expect in the 2008 national elections in the US.

Mark Fontecchio at SearchDataCenter.com reports that the "PG&E and Sun rebate program gets mixed reaction". Well, the EPA sounds intrigued, other utilities sounds interested, and customers are viewing it positively. Seems like the only folks on the other side are competitors. Cool!

Lin Nease of HP makes an important point: "If you look at the lifecycle, the rebate is a miniscule part of the equation". We agree. Based on the study we did with PG&E the annual energy savings for each year were more than the rebate, so we're trying to get the word out that there's lots of savings to be had here even if you aren't in the PG&E area.

Olivier Helleboid from HP and Mark Feverston from Unisys are stuck on this point that there are more important savings to be had elsewhere. Somehow I don't buy this point that we shouldn't design, deliver and reward customers for buying more efficient servers because we can save energy in other places as well. Can't we do both? In the case of Mr. Feverston, aren't you saying that we shouldn't increase the MPG of cars because we can also save energy carpooling? We're big fans of virtualization at Sun, and we think you can have BOTH energy efficiency (servers and cars) and savings through consolidation (virtualization and car pools).

I got my first issue of Good Magazine the other day I've enjoyed reading it. First off its got a good sense of humor. But I also appreciated the optimistic, action oriented tone of the work.

One piece that particularly caught my attention was "Doublespeak: Do companies really give a damn?" by Jonathan Greenblatt, founder of Ethos water. It's an editorial about authenticity, and how sometimes corporate communications has it and sometimes it doesn't. While it brought back painful memories of a few weeks ago when Tim Bray chided me for an unreadable quote of mine in a press release, it really hit home in the context of our upcoming corporate social responsibility (CSR) report.

How do we make a report like this sound authentic? What makes it sound like we mean it, and what makes it sound like we don't? In short, what is Sun's "authentic voice"?

I don't have a great answer yet (I suppose the proof will be in the pudding), but its causing some interesting discussion and experiments to take place. More to come on this in upcoming posts...

Like Hal, I thought some of the responses to Jonathan's digital divide entry were a little too, well, divisive.

My first reaction mirrored Hal's: this isn't a valid either-or. If I told you "I'm concentrating on my job for the next couple of months, so I'm going to have to stop being polite to others", you'd call me, at best, crazy. Well, with over 30,000 employees, bigger things can happen.

My second reaction relates to the changes I've seen in Sun since I left in 2001. In the traditional business model, there's the company and there's the potential customers, the latter being a group who has been targeted by the company through some business plan. You come up with marketing plans, budget for sales folks, build out a field engineering team, etc.

Lets apply this point of view to Jonathan's digital divide post: Yowza! This can't possibly make sense! Sun is diluting its focus and going after a market that clearly can't justify the cost of customer acquisition!

Now I'm not going to argue that this traditional business approach is wrong. What I'm going to argue is that the traditional business/customer relationship is not the only meaningful one in the Participation Age. Sun needs relationships with developers, hosting companies, handset manufacturers, bloggers, sys admins, etc, etc. Most of these relationships lack the well-defined structure of the traditional business/customer relationship, but that doesn't mean they lack value. Furthermore, the "cost" of these relationships doesn't have to be as high as the traditional relationship as well.

The ability to identify these other types of relationships, putting plans around them and executing on them is one of the big changes I've seen in Sun over the last five years. And it's through this thought process of a wider range of relationships that Sun looks at the broader set of opportunities outlined by Jonathan.

Just wanted to take a minute and remember my friend and colleague Phil Rosenzweig. Phil was a long-time Sun employee and was killed five years ago today on one of the planes that left Boston.

In memory of Phil, someone else you know, or the whole event, please try to do something nice for someone today. Go a little out of your way to hold a door open, call someone you haven't talked to for a while, or give someone you love a hug. We need to remind ourselves and everyone else of the things that are great about this country and its people.

On a family trip to Colorado this month, we made a short stop at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder. They run a nice lunchtime tour there, and it was interesting to hear what they're working on in the area of climate change and modeling. They bought a Connection Machine that I helped design way back in the Thinking Machines days, and I've always loved visiting there.

I couldn't resist asking one embarrassing question, though. When we were standing in front of their world-class supercomputing center talking about how it was helping analyze climate change, I had to raise my hand and ask how much CO2 that data center was responsible for? I know from our data center near Boulder that the electricity there is very "dirty" (over 2 pounds of CO2 per kWH, much higher than the national average which is around 1.3 pounds).

I got a graceful but data-free answer. I was hoping they were exploring alternate energy, but it sounded like they were mainly focused on lower power usage by the computers (which is tough with high end scientific computers).

For what its worth, my guess is that they're somewhere over 10,000 tons of CO2/yr (that'd equate to a 10MW facility), which is similar to driving a car 20 or 30 million miles.