If you want to compare servers to Hallmark products, Microsoft is no longer the little old lady who buys a shopping cart full of Christmas cards on December 26th.  Instead, the company has decided to send cards to fewer people and save its money for 11 months.  Or, to drop the metaphor, you might just say that Microsoft’s delayed the construction of a data center.

 Arne Josefsberg

A piece of land that Microsoft already owns in West Des Moines, Iowa should stay undeveloped for some amount of time as a result.  Arne Josefsberg and Michael Manos, who are general managers of infrastructure services and data centers at Microsoft, respectively, explained the decision on the ms datacenters site.

The pair wrote, “We measure everything in our data center operations to the point of obsession, and continually analyze our measurements to identify areas where we can improve efficiency and increase ROI.”  Advances have been made in the areas of virtualization, capacity allocation, and power density, so “we will be able to delay the construction and opening of some of our facilities, which will save Microsoft and its shareholders significant operating expenses . . .”

Josefsberg and Manos then mentioned data centers that are under construction in Dublin and Chicago, although the would-be data center in Iowa’s the only one to be affected so far.

Current Microsoft employees probably prefer data center delays over more layoffs, anyway.