Microsoft Kills Expression Suite — And Makes It Free, For Now 89
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."
Maybe (Score:5, Insightful)
They should just open source it
Re:Maybe (Score:5, Interesting)
They should just open source it
Possibly. They open sourced their F# compiler. It's not too uncommon for them.
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Re:Maybe (Score:4, Informative)
libre != open source
ftfy
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Oups. I erred, should say
and libre != open source
(remove ftfy)
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They should just open source it
And you would be bitching about how companies just dumps products as open source and expect the community to fix it...
:)
The code is probably useless anyway...
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You don't need to "expect the community to fix it." Just make the source code available.
The bigger problem is the potential for legal/PR problems. Before Microsoft open sourced something like this, I'd expect they'd want to go through the code and comments making sure there's nothing problematic.
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Better than killing a product and keeping the source private. At least by open sourcing, they allow users who are dedicated to it (either emotionally or for real technical reasons) to keep it going themselves, and perhaps even improve on it. Which is sort of the point of FOSS in the first place, right?
Re:Maybe (Score:5, 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.
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I agree completely with you. I understand Microsoft's desire was that designers could use blend and developers could use VS to get things done, but most developers end up using blend more than the designers to tweak things or to develop interfaces when the designers just give them a photoshop rendering to use as a basis. And in the cases of small companies the developer is the designer, developer, tester and deployer, so they end up having to switch between all sorts of tools.
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Viva la Blend (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Viva la Blend (Score:4, Insightful)
I like the Blend products' features but I never understood why they were not part of Visual Studio. I've always been frustrated having to switch between the two environments. I consider merging Blend with VS a great step forward.
Did n't even know (Score:3, Insightful)
that Microsoft even had a design suite. I guess that shows how successful it was.
Re:Did n't even know (Score:5, Insightful)
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I use Visual Studio and never heard of it before today yet apparently I should have because it is now being integrated in to a product that I use on a daily basis.
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Expression Web is a Dreamweaver knockoff.
Expression Blend is a XAML UI designer for WPF/Silverlight
Expression Design is for vector (and raster) design
Expression Encoder is a screen recorder and modest editor
The suites have been part of the BizSpark and DreamSpark programs for a while now.
Yes, MS devel customers didn't know of it = fail (Score:1, Troll)
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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 somethin
Yes it does mean failure. (Score:3, Informative)
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.
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While I agree that Microsoft did a very poor job of marketing Expression, a single customer not knowing about the product means nothing (which I think was the point of the parent poster).
If you have worked as a developer in any environment released in the last 5 years, you should definitely know what Expression Studio is. If you work in Visual Studio at all, you should know what Expression Studio. Not knowing this tells far more about a developer's ability to stay knowledgeable about his chosen technology
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I think that is unfair because Visual Studio can be used for a lot of different things. Why would anyone using VS to develop Windows Apps for example need to have knowledge of Expression Studio?
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This is like saying OneNote is a massive failure because somebody who uses Excel doesn't know about it.
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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!
If Microsoft design suite is unknown to 4 digit slashdotters, it is doomed indeed. So even if you had intended it to be a snark, it turned out to be insightful.
Re:Did n't even know (Score:5, Informative)
It was about "design" as in "interactive user interface design", not as in Illustrator, Inkscape, Photoshop etc.
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I get that my point is, I'm aware of flash, dreamweaver, etc even though I don't use them yet I've never heard of this product.
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they used it, among other things, to replace frontpage.
that, I'm pretty sure you've heard of...
and it makes better sense now too that you hadn't, eh?
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It was about "design" as in "interactive user interface design", not as in Illustrator, Inkscape, Photoshop etc.
Expression Web is a web design tool along the lines of Dreamweaver. It was the successor to Microsoft's FrontPage (actually it looked to me as if it was just FrontPage rebranded).
Most of this Expression suite was intended as general design software - the UI bits were just a subset.
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Corel Draw is still around. But it is a vector-based program so is not in the same ball-park (it includes Corel Photo Paint (or did) which is more equivalent). If Gimp is the open source competitor to Photoshop, Inkscape is the open source competitor to Corel Draw.
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that Microsoft even had a design suite. I guess that shows how successful it was.
That is because Slashdot usually does not cover launches of MS products, but makes a big deal of it when they're EOL'ed. If you get your news from sites like Slashdot, you automatically become ignorant like if you solely watch Fox News or even MSNBC.
Also look at the submitter's submitted stories. http://slashdot.org/~mikejuk [slashdot.org]
Hundreds of stories linking to i-programmer.info
This is nothing but pure blogspam.
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that's becuase it isn't a design suite really. Its a developer tool that they thought - either through greed or naievety - that they could sell twice.
Once upon a time, all the developer tooling was inside visual Studio, so a dev could knock up a GUI and hook it into the code he'd written. Then Microsoft invented XAML and next thing you know visual studio's XAML editing capabilities were extremely poor (ie often would crash if you tried to do anything remotely complicated, couldn't review what the GUI looke
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Title of post was spot on (Score:3)
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.
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Much more likely it will go the way of Truespace, available for download until suddenly gone without a trace.
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The rub therein lies in that few professional designers use Windows to start with, and that the growing population of iPad users is learning to do this stuff on tablets.
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Bullshit. MS killed this product because everyone hated switching from Expression to VS and back. People just wanted the Expression features in VS. This is great news for everyone who ever used Expression. Also note that MS cannot just drop the features. After all there should be some way to develop pretty UI interfaces on MS platforms.
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It was unusable for one simple reason (Score:5, Interesting)
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Not only that, but it was also very easy to add effects like a gradient which when used in the application could use huge amounts of cpu time whenever an update required a refresh. Then you have to recreate the effect using a pixel shader in Visual Studio in order to get your performance back.
We also had various cases where the project could not be opened in Blend and worked with unless the current project settings were exactly right and the code behind it was perfect as well. That made handing off the proj
Badly named suite (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
They should have called them Microsoft Design, Microsoft Blend, etc
I call bullshit. It doesn't matter what Microsoft called it. Obviously after the success of eXPerience, they felt eXPression would be as successful as Windows XP. Vista was a good name, and many successful non-operating systems are branded by that name and do well. But in Microsoft's case, a more apt name would've been Shit-sta.
The newest OSes are named 7 and 8 - totally un-imaginative names. While 7 has got a 'harmless' reputation, slowl
Re:Badly named suite (Score:5, 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.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Simple reason to drop the product (Score:5, Funny)
Creating fancy or professional graphical interfaces doesn't fit in with Microsoft's new future of big square blocks for everything.
They bought a good app and killed it slowly (Score:3, Insightful)
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Source? Wikipedia has nothing to say about this and it would be very strange if MS bought a tool from another company to be used with the language they just created (XAML).
Slashdot's Primary Interest in this Story (Score:5, Funny)
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Also it is interesting how /. gives negative spin on this move that is considered positive by devs who use the tools. We're doing XAML development and using Blend and our team was quite happy to hear the news. None of us ever liked that Blend (or Expression Web for that matter) features were separate from VS UI designer.
Developers, developers, developers ! (Score:2)
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.
Another down (Score:2)
Microsoft killed Expression when they started (Score:1)
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
You do know c# is an OOP language right? (Score:1)
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 fut
Wa wa (Score:1)
> "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! [instantrimshot.com]
Encoder 4? (Score:2)
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.