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202 • Green Project Management

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What they do for us
It goes without saying that Microsoft through its founder has shown
an ultimate commitment to corporate social responsibility. Using their
significant resources, founder Bill Gates and his wife, Melinda, created
a foundation to help all people lead healthy, productive lives. From the
foundation’s Web site: “In developing countries, we focus on improving
people’s health and giving them the chance to lift themselves out of hun-
ger and extreme poverty. In the United States, we seek to ensure that all
people—especially those with the fewest resources—have access to the
opportunities they need to succeed in school and life.”
Microsoft’s commitment to corporate citizenship is to be accountable
to their millions of customers and stakeholders around the world. While
working to meet the needs of their customers and stakeholders, Microsoft
is committed to creating value for their partners, employees, and wider
society, and to managing their business sustainably.
In addition to corporate citizenship, business sustainability is a focus
for their green project managers. According to Microsoft, they “are com-
mitted to software and technology innovation that helps people and orga-
nizations around the world improve the environment. Our goals are to
reduce the impact of our operations and products and to drive respon-
sible environmental leadership.” So, like Google, Microsoft is informa-
tion technologically driven and also active in the global community, as
indicated by their participation in the UN’s Climate Change Conference
in Copenhagen (COP15). Arguably, different people received different
messages from COP15, but the issue here is not the outcome but rather
the participation by Microsoft. They were clearly in support of the effort,
addressing issues and providing technology experts. Microsoft envisions a
scenario where technology can offer software tools to help increase energy
efficiency, used to accelerate the research and development of clean-energy
sources, and provides decision-making tools to better predict the impact
of climate change. All noble efforts, but what concrete green measures are
they undertaking?
One of their efforts is to reduce energy consumption and carbon emis-
sions. As mentioned previously, virtualization can save energy. Microsoft’s
virtualization enables multiple operating systems to run on a single server