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."

It was unusable for one simple reason

[grungeman]

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.

Re:Maybe

[kthreadd]

They should just open source it

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

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Badly named suite

[jkrise]

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, slowly getting mindshare away from XP unlike Vista, 8 has been very polarising in the market - with extreme feedback in both directions coming from the customers. Names or brands mean very little in the eventual success and adoption of a product. What matters more is performance, quality and reputation.