In Kill all screensavers, Nick Carr writes about a problem facing CIOs wanting to harness idle compute resources: graphic and compute-intensive corporate screensavers. We have all seen these screensavers either in our own companies or while visiting others. Depending on who you ask, these either encroach on the employee environment or they are a valuable conduit for employee education. They are also mistakingly considered a green alternative to employee communications versus paper-based communications as screensavers can cause enormous power consumption in aggregate. Nick Carr has some numbers supporting this view in his article.

Delivering employee messaging through screensavers is incredibly inefficient: aren’t employees either using their computers (i.e., there is no screensaver running), or doing something else (i.e., not looking at their screensavers)? But when the employee is out of the office, it runs 100% of the time. 16+ hours of employee communications directed at an empty chair.

Want a green alternative to employee messaging? Use e-mail.

Save your idle compute resources for applications that deliver real business value. That is one of the reasons we developed the Digipede Network: to deliver real business value on idle resources.

Aside from grid computing, the CIOs should be successful fighting the screensaver with the power savings argument.