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."

Simple reason to drop the product

[qzzpjs]

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

Slashdot's Primary Interest in this Story

[guttentag]

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.