
Microsoft Kills Expression Suite - ayi
http://expression.microsoft.com/en-US/
======
alexforster
"Kills" isn't a fair characterization.

Blend was the bread and butter of the suite; it was like the "Photoshop" of
Adobe's Creative Suite.

Here's the first paragraph of the right-hand column:

    
    
      Blend will be fully integrated with Visual Studio 2012.
      Blend for Visual Studio 2012 provides a rich design-centric
      environment for building Windows Store apps and Windows
      Phone apps. In addition, WPF, Silverlight and SketchFlow
      support is available today as a preview and will be released
      in Visual Studio 2012 Update 2.
    

Yes, they're killing Design and Web, but those were only [very] poor
competitors to Illustrator and Dreamweaver, respectively.

~~~
randomfool
Blend is effectively dead as well- the people responsible for the 'creative'
side of the product were re-org'ed out this summer.

The core of Blend goes into VS, but the vision is going to be traditional
WinForms design scenarios from now on out- that's what management is looking
for.

------
xradionut
I came this || close to buying Expression Studio for a team member last week.
:/

The problem is that Microsoft still doesn't communicate it's big vision to
developers at large. There's a lot of dead ends and blind alleys that people
get led into...

I'm currently commited 80% timewise to the MS stack, but over the last decade
alternatives have matured, and attitudes among the folks with the purse
strings have changed towards other tech options in the marketplace. It was
another weird quirk of timing that I read this news about Expression while
installing various Python packages on a Linux box...

~~~
ct
Totally concur about lack of communication to devs which is why despite being
primarily a MS dev I haven't bothered to jump on the WinRT/Win8 app store
empty bandwagon, and have instead been playing with Objective C recently.

For MS to regain status:

1) Fire Ballmer and get someone that understands technology/design to lead a
tech company

2) Be more transparent to devs

3) Put more resources to the core tech that differentiates their OS like Apple
does with Objective C API, MS should be doing with WPF (not Silverlight or
WinRT or another tech - their thought process of supporting JS didn't really
gain much JS devs for Win8/WinRT apps, and just ended up burning bridges with
long time MS enterprise devs)

Failing the above I see MS losing more devs and as a result less apps
supporting the OS and finally less market share.

~~~
colin_jack
I don't agree TBH, they are pretty transparent its just a lot of what things
don't get beyond hype (Oslo), some never even get close to being generally
useful (WF, WCF) and others get massively over hyped and then crash and burn
(Silverlight).

To me its not the transparency that's the issue, its the fact that they so
many of their ideas are duds.

------
fractallyte
This is dreadful news. 'Expression Suite' was built on Microsoft's acquisition
of Creature House in 2003, and their fabulous Expression vector graphics
software (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creature_House_Expression>).

At the time, Expression was the closest competitor to Adobe Illustrator: it
had unique features ('skeletal strokes', based on the co-founders' PhD
research), and a superb UI (yes, imagine a streamlined, friendly interface
that was _different_ to Adobe's!). The animation version of Expression,
LivingCels, offered similarly innovative animation technology, which was
seriously being looked upon as a competitor to Flash. More significantly,
though, it was on course to disrupt the (cel-based) animation industry.
There's an informational site at: <http://livingcels.com>

_That's_ why Microsoft bought the company.

So, the little things: Creature House bought back the rights to Expression
after MetaCreations went down. (I _wish_ they'd do so now, once more!) The
wonderfully whimsical website with beautiful, funny illustrations (by Patrick
Lee) was replaced fairly rapidly by Microsoft's soulless corporate rendition.
There was a Mac version of Expression - abandoned. Then the Windows version
was re-coded to fit into WPF (dropping lots of essential features along the
way). LivingCels has vanished.

I still use Expression almost daily. It runs perfectly in WINE (especially
important now, since the Mac version isn't Intel-compatible). The user manual
is a brilliant example of how manuals _should_ be written, and the sample
illustrations demonstrate how painterly effects can be achieved through vector
gfx.

There's still nothing quite like Creature House Expression, so it's fortunate
that Microsoft are still offering these original versions (Windows & Mac) as
free downloads (check the links at the end of the Wikipedia article).

~~~
jarek-foksa
I would say that Freehand and CorelDraw were the closest competitors to
Illustrator back then. I didn't even know about Creature House before
Microsoft acquisition.

------
stblack
Microsoft is a bulti-billion dollar company that doesn't much care for
developers and users of its products. Oh, it says it cares, and for the
incremental cost of an MSDN subscription it can buy the silence and obeisance
of influential developers for years.

In the end, it will always suck to be a developer using Microsoft technology.

Here's the Microsoft bandwagon graveyard:

* 3D Movie Maker * Active Documents * ActiveX * COM * COM+ * Courier Tablet * DAO * dbWeb * DDE * Desktop Gadgets * Encarta * Expression and Expression Suite * Frontpage * HailStorm * LINQ to SQL * Live Labs * Live Search Books, Live Search Academic * Microsoft Bob * Microsoft Equipt * Microsoft Kin * Microsoft Live * Microsoft Live One Care * Microsoft Max * Microsoft Passport * Microsoft Repository * Money * MSN Music * OLE * OneCare * OS/2 * Remote Data Objects(RDO) * Response Point * Silverlight * "Smart" Watches * Soapbox * SQL Server DMO * SQL Server DTS * Tablet PC * VB * VBA replaced by VSA * Vine * Vista * Visual Basic * Visual FoxPro * Visual Interdev * Visual JPlus Plus * Visual Source Safe * Web data access via IDC * Windows DNA * Windows for Tablets * Windows Live Spaces * WinFS * Word Basic * WordHelp (.hlp) * XBox Live Service * Zune

Many of these probably deserved to die. But Microsoft's propensity for
suddenly marooning thousands of developers and millions of users at a single
stroke is unconscionable.

~~~
jmspring
Silverlight dead? Funny, desktop / laptop machines still require it for
Netflix -- not a small audience.

OS/2? Learn your history, MSFT helped create it, but it was an IBM product.

XBox Live? Last I checked it was still around.

I'm not a particularly MSFT oriented person (apple household) but having been
around long enough, you might want to expand your horizons around MSFT product
life cycles.

And, I very much disagree with your comment of "It will always suck to be a
developer using MSFT technologies" ... Assorted MSFT technologies have made
developers a lot of money over the years and I don't see that changing much in
the next few years. Yes, they lag at mobile, but they are pretty damn big
still.

~~~
yuhong
>OS/2? Learn your history, MSFT helped create it, but it was an IBM product.

Actually, MS did once bet on OS/2. It is unfortunate that what was originally
the MS OS/2 2.0 SDK turned into an entire fiasco. I really should write a blog
series about it. In the meantime, look up "MS OS/2 2.0 SDK" and "Microsoft
Munchkins OS/2".

~~~
jmspring
They bet on it for a short while, but I was referencing the fact that they
hopped ship and OS/2 continued under IBM for _years_. OS/2 Warp, continuing to
run in ATM machines, the community wanting to continue OS/2, etc. It did
eventually die, but it maintained a life well after MSFT decided to move on.

I still miss Galactic Civilizations. One of the better space strategy games.

~~~
scrumper
An aside: GC2 is a fine successor. DRM-free, too. <http://www.galciv2.com/>

~~~
eru
I tried that. But the original Master of Orion still beats it.

------
sergiotapia
What happens to all the people who spent years learning how to use it?

It's kind of scary to think you spend learning something in and out only to
find out that it's later going to be deprecated entirely. Like Silverlight. Oh
well, at least with Silverlight you got something applicable out of it: XAML
which works on Windows Phone 8, WPF, etc.

~~~
jared314
You are describing what Microsoft has done, and is known for doing, for more
than a decade. I saw one developer create a list of MS technologies he would
ignore because he felt they would disappear. A will-not-learn list.

~~~
christoph
A lot of people I know put SharePoint on that list many years ago... A lot of
people I know also got a decent wage out of it...

~~~
DenisM
SharePoint is a fat cash cow. It's not going anywhere.

~~~
at-fates-hands
I can vouch for this. I work for a large corporation who has tied all of their
development to Sharepoint. The CTO has told everybody several times, in no
uncertain terms, there will be no changing from Sharepoint or Microsoft and to
just deal with it.

The only glimmer of hope is in the 2013 release I've been told we can build a
decent CMS layer on top of Sharepoint.

------
Moto7451
Not sure what to feel about the other products as I never used them (did
anyone?) but I'm glad Blend's editor made its way into VS2012. Working with
the built in XAML WYSIWIG editor in past versions of VS was always terrible.

People always seemed to be put off by the $300 price tag for the package but I
felt it was worth every penny for the keyframe animation mode and just to
avoid crashing multiple times per day when accidentally opening a complex XAML
file in split mode.

I haven't been on the MS side of things in a few months now but I'll have to
go play with VS2012.

Edit: Also wanted to add, for those who actually used Design to do Vector
graphics -> XAML conversions, there's an Illustrator plugin available to do
that:

<http://www.mikeswanson.com/xamlexport/>

------
kenjackson
Finally! Not having Blend in VS was always odd to me. Merging them makes sense
for everyone. I can't say I ever used Design or Web, nor knew anyone that did.
I have an odd workflow of Paint.Net and Powerpoint for design (yes,
Powerpoint).

~~~
w-ll
Thinking about it... Powerpoint (presentation software) could be `killer` for
mockups. You could go through flows directly. Clicking on things and what-not.
Im gonna play with a mix of presentation suits and mock up builders this
weekend.

~~~
barkingcat
No . Please no. I had to work with a design shop that sent website mocks using
powerpoint decks. It was so much pain to implement that in html.

The horrifying thing was when on a call, they said - "take a look at slides
259 and 260, and you see the difference when I move between those slides???" I
could see no such thing - and even if they had done it more obviously(like
used a circle or something to point out what had changed) powerpoint is so
nasty for showing flows. The forced animations, the transitions :(

It's a good idea in theory, but in practice powerpoint the software is for
demos and presentations - not for mockups.

------
Daishiman
At this point, I can't really say I feel bad for their customers, who have
already been burnt so many times by Microsoft's abandonment of technologies in
pursuit of the next shiny thing.

------
ditoa
Kind of guessed this was going to happen as soon as I saw Blend as part of
VS2012. Glad I didn't spend much time with these tools.

------
arikrak
Even though they won't be developing git further, Expression Web and Design
are decent programs, so its nice that they'll be free.

------
SaltySquid
Yeah, this sucks... I just bought the Expression Studio several months ago,
and now half the stuff in it is free to download. It would've been nice to
have known (for sure) what the future held before I bought it.

~~~
encoderer
<http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/productrefund/refund.mspx>

If you bought it using a credit (not debit) card then there's also a shot that
you have purchase protection benefits that include price protection and
compensation for you if a retailer refuses to accept a returned product.

If your card _doesn't_ have those things -- or ESPECIALLY if you're using a
Debit card -- this is a good time to learn that debit cards are awful and you
should be adding a good go-to credit card.

Any basic Visa Signature card will be a good start, but I'd suggest finding a
Signature card that adds in better price protection. Some that come to mind:

* Fidelity 1.5% cashback Amex offered by FIA (aka Bank of America)

* Chase British Airways card -- includes _100,000 bonus miles_ , very nearly enough to fly first class from SFO to CDG, a $10,000 fare.

* Just about any American Express card -- unless you travel and want the access to airport lounges, the Blue card is often best. Get the variant that best matches your circumstances.

There are many others, but that's a good start. For pure cashback (a little
unsure of the Signature benefits):

* Barclays' Priceline-branded card recently changed their rewards. It's a straight 2% cashback card now which is fantastic. And you get a card with Shatner on it.

* NASA federal credit union has a great 2% cashback card, too. It's changed recently and I'm not totally sure of the details but the last I checked it was 2% after you spent a preset amount each year. You can join by becoming a member of, IIRC, the Stargazers society.

Basic, no-benefits credit cards are silly -- get a good one! It's easy! But
debit cards are evil. Friends don't let friends use debit cards.

~~~
sunsu
Capital One Venture card is 2% and you get all the Visa Signature benefits.

~~~
encoderer
It's not an awful card, but it doesn't offer price match protection (you buy a
TV for $999, a month later it's dropped to $799, with the cards I mentioned in
the first group you'll get a $200 rebate).

Also, anecdotally, Capital One doesn't seem to grow as reliably with you as
other cards. That is, more people get a $5k citi, chase, amex, etc, that grows
to $25k than happens with Capital One. It's not unheard of, but generally the
accepted consensus is that Capital One doesn't grow as easily.

------
edandersen
It is a great trend of Microsoft to release "free" versions of discontinued
software. First Microsoft Money, now Expression Studio. I wonder what their
competitors think about it though.

------
darrenkopp
What's happening to super preview? Last time I looked at the expression suite,
that looked like a sweet tool.

------
rebelidealist
Sad day.

------
camus
this is so Microsoft... all we need is visual studio to be even more "bloated"
...

