Microsoft Hohm

» see microsoft-hohm.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

The name was home with an ohm pushed into the middle of it, which gives away the entire pitch before you read a line of marketing. Microsoft announced it on 24 June 2009 and opened the beta on 6 July, free, to anyone in the United States with a browser and an electricity bill.

What separated it from the other energy dashboard of that summer was that it needed nothing attached to your house. Google PowerMeter wanted either a utility willing to release your smart meter readings or a sensor clamped onto your wiring. Hohm would take a questionnaire instead. Microsoft licensed the Home Energy Saver model from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a physics simulation of a house that had been in development for years before anybody thought to put it behind a web form, and fed it your answers about square footage and the age of the water heater. Out came an estimate and a ranked list of things worth changing. If your utility did participate, and a few did, Seattle City Light among them, the numbers got sharper.

For a while it looked like a product Microsoft meant to keep. On 31 March 2010, at the New York Auto Show, Ford announced it would use Hohm to help Focus Electric owners work out when to charge, which in practice meant finding the cheapest hours on their local rate. Later that year Hohm and the Berkeley model underneath it took an R&D 100 award. Two of the largest software companies on earth were competing over the same free dashboard, and the press covered it as a fight.

None of this could have reached Turkey in 2009, and the reason sits upstream of Microsoft. Hohm was open to United States accounts only, but the deeper problem was that the whole category assumed a relationship with your electricity supplier that did not exist here. The meter in an apartment building in Ankara was read by a person who walked up to it with a form every month or two, and the bill arrived on paper afterward. There was no stream of readings to release, so there was nothing for a dashboard to draw.

~ the dossier ~

~ the questionnaire problem ~

The survey was Hohm's best idea and also its ceiling. A model that estimates from your answers hands you a number on day one with no hardware to buy, which removes the hardest barrier in the category. But an estimate does not move when you leave the oven on, and the behavioral theory these products rested on required feedback fast enough to connect an action to a consequence. Hohm could tell you that your house was probably losing money through an old water heater. It could not tell you that you had done something wasteful this afternoon.

There was a selection problem underneath that. Anyone patient enough to answer forty questions about insulation was already the sort of person who had read about insulation. Everybody else wanted a smaller bill without being interviewed first.

~ the week both of them died ~

Google posted PowerMeter's obituary on 24 June 2011. Microsoft's notice went up on the Hohm blog six days later, on 30 June, and coverage split between that date and 1 July depending on the outlet. The stated reason was slow overall market adoption, with the usual line about focusing on products more capable of supporting long-term growth.

The eleven-month tail is the strange detail. Microsoft normally gives a dying web property weeks. Hohm got most of a year, which was long enough for the Focus Electric to reach actual buyers in 2012 while the energy service Ford had announced for it two years earlier was already scheduled for deletion. The service finally stopped on 31 May 2012.

~ what it became ~

The idea did not disappear, it relocated to where the meter already was. Opower, founded in 2007, sold the same behavioral nudge to the utilities themselves rather than to their customers, and it arrived as a page inside the bill you were opening anyway. Oracle bought the company in 2016 for around $532 million. Nest went the other direction and put the intelligence into the thermostat, where it could act without asking anyone to log in.

Both of those work because they removed the step Hohm depended on, which was a person deciding to visit a website about electricity. That was always the weak joint. A dashboard competing for attention against the rest of the internet loses, and it loses to things that are not even trying.

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