#47a - The Microsoft Azure dilemma with Holly and William Alpine - Learnings from a 10K employee grassroots sustainability initiative

They both went to this job interview to hone their skills, and got a dream job at Microsoft! In its fast-growing and AI-pioneered Azure division and with a romance on top of it… 💕
Yet several years later, Holly and Will Alpine decided to both resign. Why? On sustainability ground, and more specifically for the lack of support on the “enabled emissions” issues. 🕵️
Holly and Will are now the Bonnie & Clyde of Azure and they provide us with an insider perspective, in a nuanced and well-documented way, on this “elephant in the room” in all big tech companies: are their sustainability claims offset by the so-called enabled emissions? 🐘

In this first part of this 2-part episode, Holly and Will shared great insights with Gaël Duez on:
🌱 Microsoft’s employee grassroot sustainability initiative which gathers now more than ten thousands people
⚖️ The opportunity cost for most middle management to support sustainability initiatives
🛠️ The difference between attributional and consequential methodologies and why it impacts the adoption of SCI enabled tools
💰 Can investing millions in local community support justify the increasing data center expansion?

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Learn more about our guest and connect: 

• Holly Alpine’s LinkedIn 
• William Alpine’s LinkedIn
• Green IO website 
• Gaël Duez's website 
  
  

📧 You can also send us an email at greenio@duez.com to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics.

Holly and Will's sources and other references mentioned in this episode:

• Quarterly Revenues from Microsoft and its cloud division 
• Microsoft latest Sustainability Report
• The carbon aware SDK from the Green Web Foundation
• “Carbon-aware computing: Measuring and reducing the carbon footprint associated with software in execution” 
• “How a Hackathon Is Slowly Changing The World” 
• Measuring the Carbon Intensity of AI in Cloud Instances
• Data center jobs scam by Gerry Mc Govern
• Frac to the Future; Oil’s Digital Rebirth (Barclays)
• Heeding the digital call to action in oil and gas