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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."
Indeed. I though Microsoft's offerings in this regard consisted of Paint (and maybe Visual Studio, for those special few who are not mentally blocking out all memory of its existence).
Not only have I never heard of this suite before, I've never heard of any of its component programs before, either. Also, from their names, I can't tell which one is supposed to compete with which of Adobe's components.
Not that it matters. People who can't afford Photoshop can just download Gimp. Gimp doesn't have as wide a range of commercial third-party plug-in modules available as Photoshop, but that only matters to people who are willing to spend a lot of money, and besides, I'd be highly surprised if Microsoft's offering had all that stuff either.
There used to be other competitors (Paint Shop Pro, and back in the nineties there was something called Correll Draw), but I haven't heard much about them lately.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
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.