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MS Expression - Opportunity Lost?

I've been watching with interest as Microsoft has been building a new set of design tools. There are a number of flavors of this tool, but as I'm primarily a web application builder, I've been most interested in the Expression Web tool. I was dismayed, to say the least, that Microsoft is not providing this tool to MSDN subscribers. An MSDN subscription is expensive, IMHO, but it gets you all of Microsoft's developer tools, along with operating systems, Office, and tons of other great software. All stuff you need to build great apps on the Microsoft platform.

Is Microsoft losing me? Why the decision not to release the Expression tools to MSDN subscribers? Microsoft's answer so far is, quite frankly, weak. They believe that developers and designers are completely diffferent target audiences. That's their reason. The Expression tools are design tools. In a perfect world, that would be a true statement, but in the real-world, at least in my experience, it's rarely true. Lots of developers do both the logic development and the UI development. I think that's true at the majority of big companies too.

So here we are. Microsoft has a great new set of tools for building beautiful UI, but they want a huge number of existing subscribers to their development tools (who pay significant subscription costs) to shell out extra money for these new tools. I can only think it's a big opportunity lost. You piss off the developers and you lose a huge number of early-adopters spreading the word. Wake-up Microsoft! In large part, we make you successful.

Can you tell I'm PO'd? Sometimes, they just make me slap my head. I'm not alone. See the comments and Robert McLaws' post here.

Tags Microsoft Expression Software Development Microsoft .NET MSDN

posted by John Walker @ 12/9/2006 1:21:00 AM

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MS Expression - Opportunity Lost?

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