Don’t get me wrong, I think it is great that awareness for environmental issues is growing and that many companies are taking serious efforts to make a difference. However, I really find it annoying when they just use it as a marketing gimmick without any real substance to back it up. An example of which I came across yesterday when I saw the advertisement pictured to the right for Rackspace’s Green Server. The marketing tactic worked on me as I was curious to see what was done to develop an environmental friendly servers. I went to the site to see their Green Server configuration, but was disappointed to not find anything revolutionary. It appears that they have just configured a server with components that consume a little less to be able to put together this marketing campaign. While this is still better than nothing, I personally don’t feel that it is worthy of the hype that their marketing campaign gives it.

Fortunately not all companies are using the “green campaign” for marketing purposes, but rather to make a real difference. An excellent example of this is Google as documented in this IEEE article. Surely there are other notable examples, please leave a comment to fill me in.