The cloud can bring a lot of value to the enterprise that knows how to leverage it properly. But it comes with its own set of dangers, and in many ways, it’s still the wild frontier out there. Case in point: This week, Microsoft and HTC both announced the shutdown of cloud services, leaving dubious migration plans and frustrated customers in their wake.

Microsoft announced as far back as October 2010 that it was hitting the power switch its Office Live Small Business (OLSB) tool, which enables the creation and hosting of public-facing websites, as of May 1st, 2012. With that date drawing ever closer, Microsoft has announced that current OLSB customers will get six free months of its Microsoft Office 365 cloud productivity suite, which contains SharePoint Online – just as good as OLSB for the same purposes, or so Microsoft claims.

But even if you accept the offering of free Office 365, the migration path isn’t so clear. According to ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley, users have to manually copy photos, text, and whatever other content over to their new website and update the DNS records. All by themselves. Some customers will have the know-how to handle the transition themselves. But not all. And come that May 1st deadline, anything not transferred out of OLSB will be gone forever.

Meanwhile, HTC will shut down its HTC Sense consumer cloud backup solution for the company’s Android smartphones on April 30th, 2012. This announcement comes with a similarly apocalyptic mandate to put your data elsewhere (HTC is offering the download of .zip files with everything) or face permanent deletion.

HTC promises that this shutdown is in advance of a new, better backup offering down the line, but details and launch dates are vague, and the only advice the smartphone vendor has in the meanwhile is to search the Google Play app store for an alternative service.

Services Angle

In a very real way, this pair of announcements vindicates a lot of cloud cynicism. Even as a booster of the cloud model, I have to admit that neither Microsoft nor HTC’s support system for those customers its pulling the rug out from is lacking, to say the least. For HTC’s part, its move is a little more forgivable given its status as a free consumer offering, but Microsoft is going to leave a lot of paying customers feeling betrayed.

Sure, third party developers are stepping in with their own migration tools, but it’s not enough. It may not be illegal, but it certainly seems almost unethical for these cloud vendors to not provide their own exit strategies for this kind of shutdown. Say what you will about on-premises systems, but for the most part, when you buy a software license, at least it’s yours until you switch, on your own timetable.