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Microsoft Kills Expression Suite — And Makes It Free, For Now

Posted by timothy on from the free-for-now-ware dept.

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."

4 of 89 comments (clear)

  1. Maybe by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    They should just open source it

  2. Re:Did n't even know by oodaloop · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Indeed. Please tell me all tools of which you are aware. All tools not on your list will be unsuccessful. Your lack of knowledge will determine the fate of untold hundreds of tools!

    --
    Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
  3. Badly named suite by Xoc-S · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Badly named suite by nine-times · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Names or brands mean very little in the eventual success and adoption of a product. What matters more is performance, quality and reputation.

      My turn to call bullshit. Good branding can't make a terrible product into a highly successful one, but terrible branding and marketing can keep a good product from being recognized as such. If you make a great tool but nobody knows about it, it won't sell. If people are aware of it, but they can't figure out what the product is supposed to be, they won't buy it. If people don't believe that the tool works well, they often won't give it a chance.

      And Microsoft's marketing isn't great. They tend to go through periods where they reuse the same name for disparate products and services. How many different things have been labelled ".Net" over the years? How many different products have had the "Live" moniker applied to them? There have been a couple very different products called "Surface". And look how inconsistent their product names are: 3, 95, 4, 98, 2000, XP, Vista, 7. And Windows 7 isn't even version 7, it's officially v6.1!

      Now I briefly used the Expression Suite a few years ago, and I can't tell you what any of these products are. Blend? No clue. Is that the one that was trying to be like Photoshop? And what market were they going after? Business? Consumer? Design? I have no idea. I thought it had been discontinued years ago, since I haven't heard anything about it.