Microsoft Expression: Carrying out a vision

The vision for Expression started long before the word Expression was ever coined; indeed it certain predates my own arrival at Microsoft. Work relating to the closer involvement of designers in the software creation process had been underway for a long time and the releases of both Vista and Office 2007 were clear indicators that it terms of design, Microsoft was making significant high level investment.

Work on the products that formed Expression Studio initially started in various different groups across the company and indeed from outside the company in two cases. With the realization that design was important to the future of software and the web, came the logical conclusion that we had to reach out to designers themselves. From these foundations, the Expression product group and the Microsoft Expression brand itself was built.

It’s been well documented, but bears repeating, that the management of the product development and marketing teams for Expression all come from software companies well known in the design industry and they bring with them significant track records shipping the software products that designers around the world use on a daily basis. We’re all working hard to bring you the next generation of Expression products to bring new waves of innovation to Microsoft’s rich technology platforms.

So what is my vision for the future of Expression? Well it starts from the basis that whilst Microsoft has a massive developer base deeply rooted in the many technologies we create, designers need to be shielded from that complexity. They need to be able to work with tools that feel familiar to them – tools that allow their creativity to be captured in a way that relates to the underlying technology. That’s why we’re passionate believers in the concept of separating design from content, or more directly for us, separating design from code.

Our two authoring tools whilst radically different, both offer this separation. Expression Web through its innovative standards based approach to website CSS and Expression Blend’s editing of XAML for both the desktop and Silverlight on the web.

With this need for separation however, ironically comes the need for togetherness, the collaboration between the designers using Expression Studio and the developers using Visual Studio. We will be working hard over the next few versions to make sure that teams can work successfully together on projects with a smooth, integrated workflow.

And finally the vision for the tools must be clearly linked to the technologies. We have great teams working on platform innovations such as Silverlight. It has a great future that builds on our vision for the future of .NET – so we need to play our part to deliver excellent design tools to work with it. In collaboration with our friends building Visual Studio, we will be working to ensure teams of designers and developers can continue to innovate on the web using world class tools.

Finally, probably most important to our group, is the feedback we get from you, our customers either now or potential. We really do listen carefully to all the comments we receive and whilst we can’t accommodate everyone’s request, they’re certainly all evaluated. So finally I encourage you all to download the trial version of Expression Studio and tell us what you like and dislike? Our vision needs to be driven by your vision and at Microsoft, we’re listening…

Eric Zocher
General Manager, Microsoft Expression