One of the hottest things around in IT is the environment, or how to act as if you care about it. Even companies that don't care at all play the game - as being green will generate money, and money will attract even more money.

IBM makes clever use of this by claiming their mainframes are greener than their servers. The interesting thing is that nobody tries to invent a really green product, but everybody keeps comparing it to other products and make it look better that way.

Anyway, the point is not that mainframes are green (we know they're not), but the cleverness to use the green argument as a sales pitch. People claimed the mainframe would disappear 20 years ago, yet mainframes are still being sold as middleware unix servers simply don't have the scale or scalability a mainframe offers. In simple words, you can't beat a dinosaur. And that's exactly what IBM says : Dinosaurs are green. Duh !