#47a - The Microsoft Azure dilemma with Holly and William Alpine - Learnings from a 10K employee grassroots sustainability initiative
Update: 2024-10-22
Description
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?
❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss an episode, twice a month, on Tuesday!
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?
❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss an episode, twice a month, on Tuesday!
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Learn more about our guest and connect:
📧 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
- “Microsoft’s Hypocrisy on AI” (The Atlantic)
- “I loved my job at Microsoft, but I had to resign on principle. Here’s why” (Fortune)
Transcript (auto-generated)
Gaël Duez (01:53 .354)
Today, I'm joined by the Bonnie and Clyde of Microsoft Azure, two experts in their respective fields who had a dream job in a company which they were proud of working for with significant achievements in their missions as well as their internal volunteering activities in the sustainability field and a romance on top of it. Yet, they decided to quit because of what they called Microsoft hypocrisy on AI.
And here we are talking about millions of tons of greenhouse gases that should not be emitted and are enabled by tech solutions based on machine learning. The exchange I had with Holly Alpine and Will Alpine was so rich that I decided to split it into two episodes. They brought very complimentary perspectives. Holly being the former head of Microsoft Data Center Community Environmental Sustainability and Employee Engagement. And being now on the board of directors of both American Forest and Zero Waste Washington, and by the way, being listed in the green biz 30 under 30, la valeur n'attend pas le nombre des années, as we say in French.
And Will, being a seasoned AI product manager, also in charge of driving sustainability within Azure across the operational machine learning lifecycle. So bringing a more technical aspect to our discussion. Shall I also add, he's a serious contributor to the software carbon intensity specification as I discovered in the episode.
One last word before we start. I know I used a catchy statement to introduce the episode and the word hypocrisy is a very strong one. But I was impressed in our discussion how nuanced and balanced were their positions and their claims. Everyone in the tech industry should take a time to pose and reflect on the dilemma they raised because it's not at all a Microsoft only debate.
Hello Will, Hello Holly, very nice to have you on the show.
Great to finally have a recording on three different time zones. So we made it. Thanks to you and welcome to the show.
Will (07:49 .437)
Thanks for having us.
Holly Alpine (07:51 .366)
Thank you, glad to be here.
Gaël Duez (07:54 .07)
Yeah, I'm especially happy regarding Will because Will at the moment, if I'm not wrong, you're at sea. Am I right?
Will (08:04 .495)
I am currently on a Sea Shepherd ship in Tasmania. We're doing a refit to prepare the ship for an Arctic voyage. So we're not on the open ocean, but I am on a boat that is floating on the water.
Gaël Duez (08:17 .344)
Okay, pretty cool. What are you doing there?
Will (08:21 .459)
This is part of a campaign to refit a boat from an old fishing vessel into one that's used to fight illegal fishing. So I'm fighting poetic justice in the work that we're doing.
Gaël Duez (08:31 .842)
Well, that's pretty cool. how an engineer, a software engineer or data scientist, I don't know which hat do you want to wear these days, how can you contribute to this kind of campaign?
Will (08:46 .459)
So my past life, I was actually a blacksmith and I picked up skills of welding and fabrication. And then I worked as a mechanical engineer. So I'm actually getting to contribute those to the mission here. It's really nice to reconnect with old selves.
Gaël Duez (09:02 .294)
I can imagine how cool is this. Okay, but let's go back to your old days. I've got thousands of questions to unpack with you. We will try to make it in one, maybe two episodes exceptionally, we'll see. Maybe just before to deep dive in all the different issues you've raised regarding Azure solutions at Microsoft, maybe could you explain us both of you a bit?
What is to work at Microsoft and especially in the data center division? It's huge, maybe Oli, can you share some numbers to grasp the magnitude of its operations?
Holly Alpine (09:45 .382)
Sure, Microsoft employees, last time I checked about 150,000 people and that's all over the world. We have countless different divisions and different programs and it's particularly with sustainability. They have a corporate sustainability team, but what we were really trying to do is embed sustainability into everything that we did all across the company. a couple years ago, Microsoft was the most profitable company on the planet Earth.
Gaël Duez (10:20 .0)
That's pretty huge. And regarding the size, maybe, Will you can comment on this, the size of the data center operation and the flagship solution, which is Azure. How big is it? I think it's a solid number two behind AWS. Correct me if I'm wrong.
Will (10:37 .075)
believe you're correct. Azure has about 20 % of the global cloud market. so Azure's revenue was about 32 billion in the fourth quarter of 2023, and it covers the entire globe. So the operations and the scale is quite staggering.
Gaël Duez (11:03 .667)
Will you meant 32 billions for the entire Microsoft revenue with Azure accounting? For roughly 40 % of it. Am I correct?
Will (11:24 .722)
That's my understanding, yes.
Gaël Duez (11:38 .807)
Well, that's pretty impressive. And regarding the tech stack, I how many data centers, how many, I mean, don't share any confidential information. It could be by order of magnitude, but are we talking about 550, 500, 5,000 hyperscaler
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