Microsoft’s Energy Monitoring Service Finally Closes Down

Microsoft is finally closing down its dedicated utility monitoring service, the Microsoft Hohm. The announcement was made just yesterday, June 30, 2011, at its very own blog site.

For those who are unfamiliar with the service, the Microsoft Hohm is a web application that lets you actively monitor your own energy consumption, and smartly makes recommendations based on how you should save energy. The service was made public last June 2009, which means that the service have technically lasted for only 3 years.

The main reason why the decision was made to take it down was because of lack of market adoption of the application. Though the idea of an energy monitoring application has received many positive feedbacks from those who have experienced using it, industrial institutions are slow to catch on its potentials, and it wasn’t able to rise up economically as it should have been.

So, instead of investing something that just stayed “stagnant”, they would instead just close it down to concentrate on other more market-competitive ideas. Microsoft also stated in their announcement that even though Microsoft Hohm is gone, they would still continue their endeavor to provide energy solutions.

Incidentally, Google’s own monitoring service, the Google Health also announced its retirement around a week prior to Microsoft’s announcement. Google Health, instead of monitoring the consumer’s energy consumption levels, monitors the consumers themselves, and allows you to place your own medical record to be analyzed by the application.

Could there be a hidden connection between the retirements of both monitoring systems? What was it with these two applications that just made them seem unpopular despite the idea being positively accepted by its users?

If you’re one of the regular users of the service, don’t worry. The service won’t be discontinued immediately, and you would still be able to use it until May 31, 2012.