Is it unfair to compare IT to Airlines? I'm not sure: IT certainly doesn't drop it's prices to sod all, in order to get people to use servers or storage they otherwise wouldn't (like EasyJet dropping prices to a tenner to fly you half way across Europe for a weekend holiday you wouldn't otherwise take) But, there are many many servers running the OS with bugger all else on top of it for the vast majority of the time - how many companies have apps that run for a month or so at year end, but have a server permanently provisioned for this task? (This would be like flying half empty planes around.)

I think that as an industry we really need to clean up, but it seems that we are starting to do so. How many airlines can say that? Easyjet, are still claiming that they are green because they use new planes, missing the fact that they don't cease to exist or be used when they are removed from the easyjet fleet. This, however could be compared to having a three year life cycle on servers, which many companies do.

We really need to start sweating assets more, centralising desktop processing so that the desktop is dumb wherever possible (with the exception of multimedia type processing, which you really can't do from a dumb term.) the advantage with thin computing is that you can have X number of terms connected to a server, if you need more power you can add servers into the farm. This enables sharing of processing power and you can really use the processing power as efficiently as possible and using servers for longer because they can run fewer terms as newer software needs more power.

There are other benefits, air con can use far less energy in a buliding that uses dumb terms. No call centre monkeys will steal a dumb term, you don't need to develop anything like as complex a bulid for a term as a wokstation and they are less expensive to licence. (In case you haven't noticed I'm a fan!)