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Microsoft is retiring its free web-based household energy usage service, which means it won't leave its beta status and instead will be killed on 31 May 2012.

The project, dubbed Hohm, is just two years old. But like Google's PowerMeter, which was billed as a home-electricity-consumption cloud service that only launched in the UK in October 2009, interest in such a service has proved way too low to justify its continued existence online.

And, just days after that announcement, Microsoft followed up with plans to dig a hole for its Hohm product.

"The feedback from customers and partners has remained encouraging throughout Microsoft Hohm's beta period," said Microsoft in a blog post.

"However, due to the slow overall market adoption of the service, we are instead focusing our efforts on products and solutions more capable of supporting long-standing growth within this evolving market."

It's almost as if two of the world's largest tech companies just sussed out that "green" isn't the issue it once was for consumers marketeers.

These days, both firms are lobbying hard about that mystical thing called "The Cloud".

To that end, Microsoft couldn't resist pointing out its apparent green credentials by bigging up the "possibilities for energy savings [that] emerge with cloud computing".

But it also placed a much larger emphasis on its energy-saving partners in that game, rather than talking about ongoing work at Redmond towers, which demonstrates well just how out of vogue the environment has seemingly become among tech giants. ®

Agentless Backup is Not a Myth