Microsoft’s Zocher talks up Expression

When you own as much of the world’s operating system market as Microsoft does, even small changes to your platform become immensely complicated in practice. For evidence of that, just consider Microsoft Expression, a line of design tools for creating 3D visuals, animation, and video clips on both Windows and Web applications. Expression is all about giving application developers and Web designers tools to take advantage of new graphics capabilities in Windows Vista, such as WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation). But Expressions has raised as many questions as it has answered: Is it an application development tool or a Web design tool? Is it Microsoft’s answer to Adobe’s Flash? Eric Zocher, general manager of the Microsoft Expression product line, chatted with InfoWorld Editor at Large Paul Krill to sort out Expression fact from fiction.

How critical is the multimedia application development space for Microsoft?

Eric Zocher: It’s very critical. The kinds of user experiences that people want to build on the Web increasingly include video and audio content, and rich graphics and animation. That’s really a core part of the Vista user experience, so WPF is part of Vista. We’re investing in WPFE (Windows Presentation Foundation Everywhere) and in the Expression tools and Visual Studio tools for WPFE because we want to enable that kind of richness on the Web.

IW: Is the Expression Tools line a development tools line or design tools line?

EZ: The Expression Tools line is a designer tools line. The difference is that it’s first and foremost focused on content rather than code. The real core tools, the real core functionality that we’re trying to enable is creating the functional content part of things. Making things look, act, and move the way the designer wants them to move rather than doing the code behind the user experience that implements all the complicated algorithms.

IW: What’s the relationship between the Expression and Visual Studio?

EZ: What we highlighted in launching Expression is that there are a lot of common file formats that both families of tools work with. And the new format that we talk about a lot is XAML — Extensible Application Markup Language — a new XML-based format that in Expression Design and in Expression Blend we create, when we’re creating graphics, 2D and 3D graphics, animation, images, and when we’re combining all those different elements to make up a screen or a particular Web page.

IW: What would you tell a business manager, an office manager — not necessarily the IT person — about why they should be excited about adding multimedia to applications?

EZ: The thing that’s easy for people to see immediately is when you talk about audio and video, you really are getting into the realm of being able to deliver training on an on-demand basis, anywhere in the world. With the kind of networks that enterprises have today, you have the ability to extend meetings and communication and have people in multiple offices of a corporation all participating in seeing a presentation and asking questions. In a business context, when you’re talking about the kinds of dashboards that an enterprise likes to have that shows the key performance indicators, the ability to do that with very rich — basically really rich data visualization — that takes strong 2D and 3D graphics capability. So that’s also something I think business people can understand.

IW: How does Microsoft see itself vis-à-vis to competitor offerings from companies such as Adobe?

EZ: There aren’t tools today from anyone for authoring for WPF and WPFE user experiences, and so from that perspective there really isn’t any competition. We need to step in to offer tools for these new platforms from Microsoft. There’s some overlap in that they have tools for building for the standard Web, and we do as well now with Expression Web.

IW: Do you have any Expression plug-ins like Flash?

EZ: No. There is no notion of an Expression plug-in. Expression is just a brand that we’ll use for the tool side, and then the brands that we’ve been talking about, like WPF and .NET are the platform brands. In the Microsoft case, we distinguish between the tool and the platform, because we have so many of those, like .NET, that are our brands for the actual platforms that these experiences run on. We’re talking about the .Net 3.0 and WPFE platforms, and Expression is strictly a tools brand, as is Visual Studio.