Microsoft Expression Suite and Launch

MS Expression

Last night I was at the Microsoft Expression Suite launch, and I suppose, since they fed me free beer and mini hamburgers, I should say a few words about what I thought about the event. Other companies, take note! All you need to do to get me to write about your product is to provide free beer and miniature foodstuffs (kidding, of course, all you need to give me is beer).

This is where I’m going to explicitly link to my disclaimer before I go on to describe the product and my opinion. I’m also going to say that I was in no way paid or compensated to write this whole thing up.

Keep reading for my thoughts on the event and product suite.

So I was invited by Microsoft to this launch at The Richmond on (wait for it) Richmond Street downtown. God knows why, really; It plainly says I work for IBM over there on the right, and I thought there was some kind of holy war between the two companies still. My interest in technology is severely waining lately as well, perhaps for the sake of other pursuits (only time will tell…). Either way, I managed to swing by before my other commitments for the evening, and it was pretty nice.

They had invited what appeared to be Toronto tech bloggers to this thing, presumably to generate buzz and start discussion about the product and what it means for the Web and MS. I’m not sure if inviting bloggers out to product launches is something that’s commonly done, but I think it was pretty well executed, and was a nice touch by Microsoft in reaching out to the community a bit. I know at IBM we typically bring clients out to our client briefing centre here at the Toronto Lab, but then again our target demographic tends to be (surprise) business customers, so it’s generally a bit more of a professional setting.

They had GK VanPatter from NextD come and talk a bit about “Design 3.0″ (there was a 1.0/2.0? everything seems to be given a version now), then they had a demo of a neat video mash-up program by Top Banana (can’t Google them for the life of me), followed by a run-down by the MS folks.

So the suite is composed of four products:

Expression Web: Described to me as an overhauled Frontpage. I guess they had to do something with it after shelving it a few years ago.
Expression Design: A Photoshop-like vector graphics drawing/editing program specifically tooled for Web/Desktop UI
Expression Blend: What I think is a UI creation program, but I’m still a little fuzzy on this.
Expression Media: A media library/asset management application that lets you store images/audio/video.

Since this is Microsoft’s attempt to leap into the Web 2.0 ring, what’s cool about all the applications created is that they’re cross-platform/browser compatible, which is refreshing coming from Microsoft. I have yet to install the free copy of the suite that they gave out to all attendees, but all of the applications appeared to have some pretty slick looking UIs. There also doesn’t look to be too steep of a learning curve for most of these products, and it looks like they’ve done a lot of work to build up a slew of tutorials and guides to help you get started with them.

I liked what I saw, for the most part. Some demo apps that they were showing were cool, and others a bit clumsy. Namely, the airline reservation app where they figured it would be more intuitive for the user to draw a line from one destination to the other on a map than it would for them to select the departure/destination locations via text boxes. This might work with destinations inside the US, but I guess they forgot that most Americans don’t know there’s other countries outside their own borders, so finding say, Cancun on a map for Spring Break would likely even pose a problem.

June 20, 2007 | Filed Under Uncategorized