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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."

11 of 89 comments (clear)

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

    They should just open source it

    1. Re:Maybe by kthreadd · · Score: 4, Interesting

      They should just open source it

      Possibly. They open sourced their F# compiler. It's not too uncommon for them.

    2. Re:Maybe by Eirenarch · · Score: 4, Informative

      /. makes this sound like a bad news but the devs who used expression (including the team I work on) view this as really positive move. While Expression Blend/Web/etc. was not a bad product everyone was frustrated that they needed to switch between Expression Whatever and Visual Studio. Everyone just wished features were part of VS as they are supposed to be now. This is not abandoning the tools this is improving the tools. Also this would never meant to compete with Adobe. Expression were tools to create UI for MS dev tools (XAML and Web) and did not include anything like Photoshop. Saying that Expression aimed to compete with Adobe is plain wrong.

  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. Re:Did n't even know by cdrnet · · Score: 5, Informative

    It was about "design" as in "interactive user interface design", not as in Illustrator, Inkscape, Photoshop etc.

  4. It was unusable for one simple reason by grungeman · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.
  5. 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.

  6. It was ok, but not great by thoughtspace · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  7. Simple reason to drop the product by qzzpjs · · Score: 5, Funny

    Creating fancy or professional graphical interfaces doesn't fit in with Microsoft's new future of big square blocks for everything.

  8. Slashdot's Primary Interest in this Story by guttentag · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.