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Microsoft Kills Expression Suite — And Makes It Free, For Now
mikejuk writes "Microsoft has announced that the Expression suite of design tools is no more. It has been removed from sale immediately and it has been placed on a maintenance only status until it reaches its end of life. Expression was Microsoft's offering for designers and competed directly with Adobe products. You can now download the components of Expression — Design 4, Web 4 and Encoder 4 — for free but you can't buy them. Of course, knowing that you are using 'doomed' products, even for free, takes some of the icing off the cake. The central component of the suite the UI designer Blend is to be integrated with Visual Studio 2012 probably along with Update 2. It looks as if Microsoft is giving up on trying to get designers to use its tools."
They should just open source it
It's a shame.
But Blend is the secret-ish weapon. However anyone who's used Blend extensively for WP and Win8 dev on large projects, while it has it's short comings, it rocks. We're seeing our WP and Win8 projects delivered considerably cheaper than our other platforms, prototype designs built as apps, not on paper, allowing us to prototype during the design phase.
that Microsoft even had a design suite. I guess that shows how successful it was.
This is what will happen next:
Like earlier versions of MS Office, in the days when WordPerfect was king, Microsoft made these versions free.
Guess what! It worked.
There are free alternatives and better paid-for ones, but they're all grassing for attention.
We now have a situation whereby professional desktop document editing has become synonymous with MS Office.
A true, tried and proven modus operandi.
Blend, See: Glorified Dialog Editor, XAML targets
When applying a gradient fill to an object it was not possible to adjust a gradient after applying. As a professional graphics designer I can say that a gradient never looks perfect the first time and always needs adjustment. Instead with Expression Design you had to apply the whole gradient again, hoping that this time it would look perfect (which never happened). This made the whole software the least productive tool ever for our job. We really tried, but Expression was simply unusable for us, I even suspect that the totally useless gradient tool is the reason why Microsoft developers decided to make the Windows 8 icons monochrome.
Signature deleted by lameness filter.
This was a failure in marketing, not technology. When this came out, it took me a while to differentiate the products because of the first word in the name being the same. I finally figured out to just drop the word "Expression" and concentrate on the second word. I think it was a huge mistake trying to use the term to group a disparate set of products. They should have called them Microsoft Design, Microsoft Blend, etc. and then packaged them as "Microsoft Designer Suite". Blend is actually pretty cool.
Like the GP, I work in a Microsoft shop now. This agency even runs Windows for SERVERS. We have dozens of copies of Visual Studio. Yet, every desktop in my department has the $2,600 Adobe collection. The fact that we've never heard of Microsoft's alternative to Adobe is a giant fail by Microsoft. It's a fail by Microsoft marketing that they've never gotten word out about the product's existence. It's also a fail of the software that it's not good enough to get even a passing mention in industry press, web sites, etc. If you haven't heard of a product I personally wrote, like Clonebox, that's because my company is tiny. If Microsoft spends milions making an entire suite of products and doesn't bother to tell their own customers about it, that's a fail.
Used Expression suite to make a custom embedded system on a pretty large project. It was good to integrate photoshop files from the graphic designers and convert them to controls. The UI turns out looking really professional - none of those stock standard UI controls and all beautifully rendered.
The main problem with the suite was that, in practice, the design flow is really one-way. If there was a change to the UI, you pretty much had to re-import the graphics, re-select the graphic items and group them into controls again.
For the next product iteration, we went back to WPF mixed with Windows Forms for old or 3rd party controls.
Sounds a lot like glade to me.
If a potential customer does n't even know that the product exists, especially one who uses their other development tools thats a big massive fail in my book.
Creating fancy or professional graphical interfaces doesn't fit in with Microsoft's new future of big square blocks for everything.
Blend is the only reason why .NET GUI programming is tolerable. Actually, scratch that, .NET GUI programming is sadomasochistic byzantine wizardry.
The original Expression app that MS bought years ago was a great start on a different style of drawing/painting app. The vectored brush shapes were innovative. MS bought it, gave it away for awhile, and that was the last I heard of it. MS really doesn't have any credibility with designers.
The potato it is uninformed.
The real reason this is news is because it means some day, when Microsoft kills the now-free product, Slashdot can publish the headline "Microsoft Finally Kills Free Expression" without being a troll or libelous.
It is far fetched to say it is alternative to Adobe. For starters it does not provide an alternative to Photoshop. If you don't provide an alternative to Photoshop how can you provide alternative to Adobe CS? Expression has always been a tool for designing UIs for dev platforms MS supports (i.e. XAML and Web). It was never meant to compete with Adobe head to head. Expression was supposed to be the tool designers would use when working on a project with developers who use MS tools. It ended up being something that takes people out of Visual Studio and while it was relatively good everyone (including designers) was annoyed that the features were not part of VS to begin with.
It's because of this motto that Windows is perceived as a developer's platform.
On the opposite, Apple is perceived as a designer's platform, because all the focus is done on the design.
In this age of the corporate pre-pack (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-packaged_insolvency) I suppose that when a rich corp's brand name has become synonymous with unfair business practices, or repeated customer disappointments, or market manipulation, or the strangling of innovation because it threatened the rich corp's business model, or other unacceptable behaviour, the logical thing to do is to jettison said brand name and start again. After all, as all cynical businesspersons know, the one thing you can rely on about consumers is the brevity of their memories.
Do slashdotters think it's likely that MS will fragment itself into smaller units--no doubt the 'agile', 'lean' and 'flexible' buzzwords would be invoked--in order to rid itself of its many self-administered taints?
Mod up for yes, down for no. Thanks.
d5
Microsoft seems to have this habit of competing with professional products by releasing half-assed products of their own. A guy I'm doing web design for swears by Expression, simply because how seamless it was to edit his site. Click save and it quickly uploads changes, much faster than my preferred Dreamweaver. However, Expression sucks balls from a professional point of view.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
Took a quick look at the product requirements only to find: .NET Framework 4.0
Silverlight 4.0
Support for Microsoft DirectX® 9.0 graphics with Windows Vista Display Driver Model (WDDM) Driver, 128 MB of graphics RAM or more, Pixel Shader 3.0 in hardware, 32-bits per pixel
Now we know why it failed. No support for OS X? Leading designers in this area swear by OS X. And why (the hell) do you design a software which is dependent on .NET instead of C++ or ... Wait a minute, I seem to remember something about MS wanting to kill Java so they reinvented the wheel only they really didn't kill Java and they got their buts sued off. Losers. So basically from the get go they designed this software NOT wot work on the leading platform for most leading developers - OS X. Genius! Epic Fail!
Not even worth a download. Plus isn't Silverlight dead yet? Another attempt to kill a competitors product by reinventing the wheel instead of working together with the rest of the community. This is why Microsoft will Fail.
> "Of course, knowing that you are using 'doomed' products, even
> for free, takes some of the icing off the cake."
I feel that way about Social Security!
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
The Micro$oft way.
C# is an OOP language running on the Microsoft CLR. The CLR is a virtual machine with garbage collection similar to the Java run time. Microsoft is making use of the CLR to make it possible to create programs for Windows 8 and Windows 8 RT without recompilation , just like Java.
You keep working on your language set that runs on a continually shrinking percentage of running devices. I'm sure your obsolete Silverlight, F# and J# skills will make for great "in my day" slashdot posts some time in the future.
Does this mean that the Windows Media format is finally going to die? I haven't used Encoder in years, and last time I went to go download it, it seemed like it was part of Expressions, so I gave up on the format.