Gauging Microsoft's Expression

The starting concept is simple: There are too many workflow problems because many existing design and Web development products cater to the needs of either the developer or the designer, but not necessarily both. Expression provides tools that are supposed to address the needs of both groups. Developer emphasis is stronger, simply because it's Microsoft forte.

A Sensible Approach
Focus on both groups is sensible. But Success with Office and Windows has shown Microsoft the benefits of incumbency. Adobe designs products that are popular and familiar. Microsoft will have to deliver the "goods" to take on Adobe. Assessment of whether Expression meets the workflow needs of developers and designers will have to wait until Microsoft releases Expression Studio's four products: Web (available today); Blend (formerly Interactive Designer, or "Sparkle"); Design (formerly known as Graphic Designer, or "Acrylic"); and Media (formerly iView Media Pro, which Microsoft acquired over the summer).

Release target is the second quarter of 2007, about the same time Adobe expects to release Creative Suite 3. Expression Studio would cost significantly less than CS3, based on CS2 pricing. CS2 sells for $1,199 direct from Adobe, with upgrades ranging from $159 to $749. Microsoft will offer its suite for $599, or $349 for an upgrade. Together, pricing and release timing strongly suggest a competitive push against Adobe products Dreamweaver, Flash, Flex, GoLive and InDesign.

Forest Key, director of product management for Microsoft's design tools, dismissed any direct competition, for now. "This is not a replacement [for Creative Suite]," he said, "but expansion of what designers do. Microsoft expects designers will use Expression products "alongside CS," he emphasized.

There's some legitimacy to Key's position because of starting points: Microsoft with the developer and Adobe with the designer. If Expression Studio delivers on its promise, it would be a boon for developers because they could take some control back from the designers and more realistically manage projects.

The Real Flash Killer
Microsoft also released a CTP (Community Technology Preview) of Windows Presentation Foundation/Everywhere.

Blend, better known as Sparkle, is not a Flash-killer, even though many people have applied that moniker. If there is a Flash competitor, it would WPF/E. The Microsoft cross-platform technology shares many Flash characteristics, including video and portable capabilities.

"Does [WPF/E] look a lot like Flash?" Key asked. "Yes." But he sees a broader, bolder competitor. "It's AJAX that's really undermining Flash right now," he insisted.

Key makes a valid point about Flash. However, AJAX doesn't broadly compete with Flash video. There, Microsoft will leverage Windows Media Video via the new media encoder coming with Expression Media. Earlier today, James Clarke, an Expression program manager, blogged about Media and the new encoder.

WPF/E's broader appeal is its ubiquitous reach. Microsoft promises support for any platform or any browser. WPF/E's design approach is two-pronged: DOM (Document Object Model)-style programming combined with an XAML (Extensible Application Markup Language)-based approach to development.

Microsoft believes this approach will give WPF/E a huge advantage over Flash on the Web because of search. Flash content is not generally indexed by search engines. I've spoken to developers that consider search to be a real Flash foible, particularly for commercial content. Workarounds like metadata tagging don't resolve the fundamental problem.

"With XAML, you'll be able to build applications that are fully indexable by search engines," Key said. When considering commercial applications, Key asserted that, "search is going to be huge."

Adobe isn't ignorant of the problem and offers a search engine software development kit . The SDK has been available for about four years. Additionally, Google is friendlier crawling and indexing Flash content--and the acquisition of YouTube, with its huge collection of Flash-formatted movies, could improve matters more.

Team Spirit
Multimedia is in the blood of Microsoft's Expression team. For example, Clark and Key both have film and video industry backgrounds. Clark was CTO of ROOT6, which resells broadcast and video products. Key worked for Lucasfilm (on Star Wars) and at Macromedia. Along the way, Key has developed a good sense of the design workflow problems Microsoft seeks to resolve with Expression.

For now, the Expression team only has one real product, Expression Web, to show for its efforts since Microsoft acquired the core technology from Creature House in 2003. Today, Microsoft also announced a new design Web site supporting Expression Studio. The theme, "cultural change," is fitting with Expression's developer-designer workflow objectives.

Expression Web is available for $299 or $99 as an upgrade from FrontPage. I used FrontPage even before Microsoft acquired the product from Vermeer nearly 11 years ago, and for years since. FrontPage produced heavily-coded pages, which starkly contrasts with Expression Web. Microsoft worked to streamline the code and to support accepted Web standards, such as cascading style sheets. Irony: Expression Web can produce standards-compliant CSS that Internet Explorer 7 cannot render.

Internet Explorer has long had problems with CSS, something Microsoft has sought to remedy with version 7. While greatly improved, Internet Explorer CSS support falls short of some other browsers, particularly Firefox 2.0. Dean Hachamovitch, head of IE development, told me that Microsoft will fix CSS problems in the next version, which presumably is 7.5.

Microsoft would do customers good by getting Expression Studio and IE 7.5 (or 8.0) out around the same time next year.