Taking into Account Sustainability of Software on the Desktop - What's Not to Like?

Tech Talk
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Hi there!

I was just over at the thread on Teams and a rant on Microsoft and in the discussion with @knewman , an idea struck me that I wanted to bounce off of everyone interested:

TLDR: Does evaluating end user software on sustainability make sense to promote more efficient software?

Today, most companies try to make their operations run more sustainably - for ecological, cost, value, and reputation reasons. For tech companies this will be the same on the centralised, organisational side. However - what about the distributed software side, i.e. the software on employees’ laptops and desktops? Case in point: Teams. But you could also say Chrome.

If you have several hundred million people around the world run inefficient pieces of software, that could be made palpable, could be rated, and an increase in efficiency might make an actual difference that can be easy rather easy to come by (might just take an update to the software).

Today, the task manager in Windows already shows which process takes the highest amount of energy. But it could go further to move away from the idea of “this software drains the battery quickly” to “this software is currently not at all behaving sustainably - do you want to look for more efficient choices?”.

While this may sound like eco-activism on negligible levels and might nag the hell out of everyone, let’s look at it from a different perspective: you have, say, Teams. Teams seems like a resource hog on individual machines, without truly demonstrating impressive performance. If every one in your company, say 10k people, is using a software that wastes resources like that - albeit, resources that most companies who sent their workforce home to work does not feel any more - it should be thorn in any sustainability and efficiency minded leadership person. At the same time, Teams being a resource hog is bringing down the performance of the system. That’s downgrading the user experience. Wouldn’t taxing less sustainable software be better for both, the environment and the user experience?

You might have a sustainability score in which Teams gets two stars, Zoom maybe three; Chrome two stars and Firefox maybe three. In the end, we might have the double advantage of leadership making decisions toward more efficient and, ideally, better running software. This will apply to the server room, but might also work well distributed through the machines of the workforce.

Sure: there is software that will need ample resources - but if we had some sort of a system to find the most efficient software, that could as well help a1) saving on hardware resources for comparable experience or a2) getting a better experience on the same hardware, and b) make a difference, ecology-wise.

Maybe it’s just a late echo to former corporate-preset machines I worked with which were always sluggish and lumbered around due to a) the amount of inefficient and painfully slow software put on the machines and b) me using my machine differently as IT intended. There was hardly ever an efficient use of the rather powerful hardware.

What do you think? Is there already something like this? Would / wouldn’t that be useful?

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I think it should definitely come into the equation. But the problem is, more and more software is being poorly written, using things like Electron - the lazy solution. This is because it is quick and you “only” need web developers.

You don’t need Windows developers, Mac developers, iOS developers, Android developers and Linux developers, you just need one team to make a mediocre performing, resource hungry, security nightmare.

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Seems like a well meaning initiative, but I could definitely see Microsoft and others gaming this kind of system by saying Teams includes the functionality of ‘x’ number of applications built into one, and is therefore relatively efficient.

Also leery of any sort of regulation like this. Look where we are with regulation regarding PCs right now - can’t even purchase certain PSUs or prebuilt PCs with higher wattage ratings in certain states, which is just insane imo.

At the end of the day I’d like to think the free market filters out the losers from the winners. Can’t count the number of poorly coded chat apps that my social group tried before settling on Discord. Teams is a poor example given Microsoft’s position, but even there I understand Teams is getting a major overhaul based on the performance problems.

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Yeah, I am thinking more along the lines of a different and more consistent way of considering sustainability in software - not so much a regulation. (However, more on this below.) The idea came to me when I visited a hackathon a couple of years back and they had for a lunch three or four different meals with each having a label on what the ecological footprint of each food would have. I tried something rated green - which I’d otherwise not have tried - and found it tasty. So the offer was good for me and not particularly bad in terms of footprint. Win - win. Free choice of multiple options, tried something new. No obligation.

I wonder if such gentle nudges cannot get us off of our trodden paths that need three or four times the world’s resources each year and back closer to one or two. Twice the earth is still double as much as we have. (And I am truly not even that “green” to begin with - simply sounds like a plausible thought.)

From a consumer standpoint, I do agree - that’s annoying.

From the standpoint of following our news every single week in the last months having one catastrophic flooding event, wildfires, droughts, or close to 120°F announced for parts of Italy the next few days, I don’t. Energy usage leads to energy production leads to emissions contributes to more and more and more factual destruction.

Leo put it quite well in some of the club-recordings before… TWIG? and I do agree: we’re past the tipping point of overusing resources and over-polluting and it may likely be a wild ride for the remainder of our lives. Still, I am convinced that I don’t need more than a full summer of natural disasters left and right to get the memo that we should be turning into the curve in order not to completely lose control. That is going to be less than convenient.

(I am writing that as a happy diesel driver, running way more machines and tech than needed, and I have a plane trip planned, and am still not too sure what to think of Greta as most of the people so the insight above is only slowly sinking into my mind.)

Certainly. Sooner or later. I’d just like customers to be offered / consider the contextual downsides of their consumption choices. But you’re right: “let the market decide” is the most likely path for the future. I just sometimes wonder how we can let growing problems take the fast track in influencing the market’s often slow self-regulation. In the end, market self-regulation got us into wanting to consume several times the amount of resources we have.

So maybe we need nudges. Not necessarily outright bans of product x or y, but having a label that says: “this thing draws twice as much as a normal one” might make some customers who really don’t need that, rethink. Not everyone - not mandatory. Self-selected. Just better informed.

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I got no love for this regulation whatsoever. It’s such a bizarre place to take action, punishing a small enthusiast market with a totally negligible impact. It reads like a revenge tactic against some parts manufacturer that quarreled with a political group in a backroom. Pure theater. Especially with renewable electricity production on an upswing.

I really don’t think the way to address these environmental issues is austerity measures. We should instead focus on problem sources where a practical solution can be forced, through engineering or just better choices. Make high-pollution practices so expensive that the alternative “green” option is cheaper.

As an example - bulk shipping should be the number one target. When it takes on average, 8 times the amount of energy to transport “product x” than it takes to actually manufacture “product x”, that’s a huge problem. Establish a ramp-up scheduled tariff on non-specialized goods based on transportation distance and weight. Consumer goods will get more expensive, but maybe they never should have been that cheap in the first place.

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Until the renewable energy is there, it is still making an impact.

We had the same thing, here in Germany, with vacuum cleaners, about 6 - 7 years ago. Suddenly, all the high power cleaners became illegal to sell. There was a new maximum power limit. You know what? The manufacturers went back to the drawing board and started using “automotive” solutions, the lower powered motors got turbo chargers, so that, with less electricity, they were actually producing more sucking power.

This is a wake-up call to the industry. Just look what Apple has managed with the M1, it is faster than the previous generation of Macs that it replaces, yet the power drops from 122W to 39W and idle drops from 19W to 6.8W. (Mac mini)

Okay, the previous generation Mac mini used a desktop processor and the current one uses a mobile part, but it still performs better and uses less power at the same time.

Energy is a finite resource, no matter how it is generated, and you can only push so much of it down the line at any one time. That means, with the increasing numbers of small devices (IoT) being plugged in, there is less available for higher power devices. Also, we have electric vehicles coming onto the net, so they will also be taking more and more capacity.

What actual, tangible benefit does a 1000W+ PC bring your average user, compared to an 800W PC? For most, maybe a couple of fps on a high resolution display that their eye couldn’t detect, if there wasn’t an fps meter in the corner of the screen. Is it really worth heating up the planet for that?

Hopefully, it will finally spur the other chip manufacturers to come out of their slumber and also start to produce more efficient chips.

I certainly look for the trade-off of power versus performance, when buying a new PC and is one of the reasons I avoid the very high end ones, not only are they not as expensive to purchase, they are cheaper to run, but I don’t see a noticeable difference in performance. But we also pay a lot more than the US for our power - I think electricity is something like twice as expensive as California over here, in Germany, and we are getting an “eco tax” on electricity and fossil fuels (gasoline, gas, coal etc.) that will cost the average home owner around an extra 600€ a year.

I am seriously considering a new M1 Mac to replace my Ryzen 7 set-up. I don’t need to do as much with virtual machines now, so the lack of Intel VM support on the M1 wouldn’t be a major factor - and it is mostly Linux and there are Linux distros that run ARM these days, for those that I need, only the 16GB is holding me back, at the moment.

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The idea is not to abolish, but to inform wasteful purchasing decisions. So there would be no punishment in that sense, if we’d agree that informing does not count as punishment. If you consider the gaming market, which is now bigger than the motion picture market, it’s a sizeable lever for reducing waste. (Which brings me to consider that movies could have the same labelling requirements on ecological footprint - but I get a sense that I’ll not be winning favours for getting carried away here… :wink: )

Aha! But here’s where you choose the punishment road, if I understand you correctly. Make previously free to choose products unattainable or punished by high prices. I would not even go that far (that might be the core of our discussion). My hypothetical proposal:

Make 3000 watt PSUs available for a perfectly reasonable price, make GPUs that draw 500 watts on their own, relish the 400 FPS frame rate discernible by none but the most elite e-sports champions - but make sure that there’s a big sticker on those boxes that these items are simply wasteful. Inform the customer. Some will reflect, others will not. Those who still chose to purchase: go ahead. “It’s a free country”.

In the end, there might be suitable uses for a 3000 watt PSU - you’d just have to make sense of it based on the additional information, too, that not only your wallet but also the planet need to be able to support that. If you say: sure - then go right ahead.

Sounds like a great idea! Let’s do that! I suppose that every little bit helps. And that would be a big step - also revitalising local production. I really hope that even those with smaller pay checks can still afford anything that we build locally. But this is not a point against it: we should decrease transporting our stuff three times around the world before finally consuming it and burning the packaging. That needs to stop. Unlikely to (I don’t think most people can afford locally manufactured options), but every first step counts.

What I fear is: both initiatives, yours and mine, are too far out of our hands. And I am not likely getting rid of my 650 watt PSU, RTX GPU or diesel engine, thank you very much. As they say: talk is cheap. :confused: But it might be better than ignoring the issue. We should give this more attention. With some luck, attention will wear away on the convenience. Either that, or the next flash flood hail storm.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts on the matter!