[thomas11]

The bigger, of course also more distant and vague, announcement is that "by 2050 Microsoft will remove from the environment all the carbon the company has emitted either directly or by electrical consumption since it was founded in 1975."

[zantana]

Begs the question does this include the inefficiencies in its products over the years, which due to their breadth of their adoption, effected hundreds of millions of computers?

I'm thinking the carbon footprint of Windows update's endless (seemingly needless?) grinding and rebooting alone ends up being more than they ever emitted manufacturing and building software.

[seveneightn9ne]

How would they decide that some computation was "needless"? If it was the best they could do at the time I'd argue it wasn't needless. If they were intentionally wasting CPU/energy for no reason it would be a different story.