What a week it's been! Had I known that it was going to take me about 25 pages and 7,000 words to describe our trip, I never would have volunteered for this gig :) I hope you've enjoyed reading through this as much as I've enjoyed putting it together and that this information is of value to some of you out there. Today is the final post in this series and provides a blissfully short summary, so if you're only going to read one of the five posts, make it this one (although you'll miss the Ali G clip).

The New Microsoft (Again)

In Tuesday's post, I talked about how Microsoft is turning a new leaf and repositioning themselves as a design-focused organization. I touched on how there's a lot of new blood breathing life into the beast and how they are making massive investments into UX for high-risk products like Office 2007 and the Ribbon.  I covered the development of the NYT Reader application and how it carefully balances layout and readability issues with brand and content. These are both examples of the positive impact that design can have when factored into your process and a very elementary and basic level and I applauded Microsoft for their efforts. You can find out a little more about their new focus in the Microsoft Design Center website.

Design Matters (Maybe?)

In Wednesday's post, I provide the corollary in which I talked about how we saw an equal number of examples where design (and UX specifically) had not been taken into account. We looked at the Virtual Earth Windows Vista Gadget which violates the User Experience Guidelines for Gadgets, and at Expression Blend which seems to be aimed at the very broad demographic of 'designers' without much consideration as to who that might be specifically. And I managed to sneak in an Ali G clip about ice cream gloves that's still making me laugh a full 24 hours later.

Expression

In Thursday's post, I gave a review of the new Expression Studio suite, which includes the Web, Design, Blend, and Media products. I liked Web but wished for a Mac OS X version, thought Design was an Illustrator knock-off with the sole advantage of being able to handle XAML, felt that Blend would be a useful tool for us if we built Windows applications, and wished that Media provided the ability to easily work from shared catalogues.

Wrapping Up

It's been almost a month since our trip which has given me a fair bit of time to think about what we'd seen and heard. The last five days have really helped me to form some conclusions and I think, in the end, the experience was exactly what I expected it to be. It was an honour to be invited to participate and I hope that I have other opportunities to do the same with Microsoft and with other firms (though I might hold off on the epic blog post series after!). It's not often that you have an opportunity to peek inside the kimono of a big software company and to get a sense of what they're thinking and working on. Like it or not, almost all of us use their software every day of our lives and they have shaped our industry like no other force. I have a lot of respect for the Microsofties and this trip reinforced that they burn their torches with the same passion and strength of belief as our colleagues in the Open Source world.

Martin joked that I should end the series with a surprise announcement that Radiant Core was going to ditch our Macs and switch over to Windows and I really thought about it (the joke announcement, not the reverse-switch), but in the end I was worried that I'd have a revolt on my hands. The truth is that even after two days of learning about their products and plans, I still don't really get it. One of our fellow attendees, Gene Smith, commented that I was under-reporting the general scepticism in the room and I think he was right. Those of us in the industry, especially my fellow UX folk, have grown used to expecting little from Microsoft and being underwhelmed. The video which Microsoft produced as a study of their own bloated box design, entitled Microsoft re-designs the Microsoft iPod 2005 Package, was brilliant not only because it was funny but because it was true. Apple is smaller than Microsoft by several orders of magnitude and has a fraction of their cash reserves and market share, and yet they consistently lead their industry because Apple builds products which people love. We are victims of marketing as much as anything else, but Apple is cool and hip and now and Microsoft is increasingly becoming boring, square, and then. The Mac vs. PC ad campaign is winning people over, not because Macs are necessarily better at photos and video, but because people want to buy into the belief that they are. This is an important point: other than the XBOX 360, people don't tend to have an overwhelmingly positive emotional response to Microsoft's products and they don't inspire the unbridled want lust in the way that only the iPhone can. At the end of the day, we run our business on Mac OS X and Apple hardware because it is easier to use, because it just works when we need it to, and because we have far fewer issues and tech support calls than we ever did running Windows. I started this series off by saying that I was no longer the Jobs worshipping, Apple flag waving fan boy that I used to be and that's definitely true. This conclusion isn't an attempt to sell you on making a switch or on how clever we are for our platform decision, though it would have been in days of yore. Bear with me for a moment while I bring us around to the final thoughts.

We believe in Open in all of its forms. We use an operating system which is built on top of an Open Source kernel (Mac OS X runs on top of the Darwin kernel which Apple released in 2000 under the Apple Public Source License). We run an Open Source web browser which we helped to develop (Mozilla Firefox is released under the Mozilla Public License). We currently build our software on a stack which rests on the most popular web server in the world (Apache is released under the Apache License Version 2.0), includes an Open Source Java Application Server (Tomcat is also part of the Apache project) and an Open Source database (MySQL is released under the GNU General Public License). We write our software in a (mostly) Open Source language (Java was recently released under the GNU GPL Version 2) and develop in an Open Source development environment (Eclipse started life as an IBM project and is released under the Eclipse Public License). We are very active members of the BarCamp community in Toronto and around the world and we dedicate a fair portion of our time to promoting the adoption of Open outside of our industry by organizing events like TransitCamp. We believe so strongly in this movement that we are exploring the possibility of releasing Foundation, our Website Management Platform, under an Open Source License before the end of 2007.

Microsoft is typically held up as the counter-example to the Open Source world in that their business practises in the past have been very closed, proprietary, and predatory. The decision to make Expression Web speak standard XHTML is a very good one and the right thing to do, but it's tempered by the decision to build the Expression Suite on XAML, a proprietary file format published for use by the public. They occupy a strange position in the technology universe, balanced on both sides of a dichotomy in which their Research labs are building some of the most innovative software in the world and yet their product divisions build products which engender little interest from consumers (Zune) or fall short of expectations (Vista). There are rumbles out there that say Microsoft has lost their mojo and are becoming less and less relevant in a world which is focused on the web and which is starting to show a stronger and stronger interest in the value of capital-D Design (led by companies like Apple, Oxo, and Target just to name a few). I think there's some truth to those suspicions and you don't need a richter scale to measure them: just compare the worldwide festivities of the Windows 95 or XP launches to the downright mellow and uninspiring "The Wow is Now" campaign for Vista. Other than the work coming out of the Research labs and XBOX teams, Microsoft is not an innovative company. I had this conversation with a few of my fellow attendees over drinks and the best examples they could come up with to defend innovation at MS were in the data warehousing field. I didn't argue - and I'm sure they're important to Data Warehousers - but that's not much of a defence. Focusing on design is a good move (even if it is playing catch up) but it needs to be a move which starts at the very top of the organization and which inspires everyone to take part. What we were shown during our visit was a great beginning and time will tell where it leads, but given that they are a technology company driven forward by the development of technology, I suspect that it will fall short if the hardcore developers within the company don't buy into it. Bill Gates is worshipped within the organization as the Alpha Geek and his Internet Tidal Wave memo successfully mobilized Microsoft to make an enormous course change in 1995 - where's the Design Tsunami equivalent?

That's it for Day 5 and the Microsoft Trip Report series! Subscribe to our RSS feed to make sure that you don't miss out on future insights from the Radiant Core.

Today we take a look at Expression Studio,  billed as:

Better Designer Tools for Better End-User Experiences

The suite includes tools for visual and web designers (Design and Web respectively), a media cataloguing tool (Media), and a cross-discipline Windows application development environment (Blend - mentioned in yesterday's post). If you haven't heard of it yet, it's only because most of them are still in Beta. Expect the hype machine to kick into action when the full suite is ready for purchase - until then, you can buy Expression Media, buy or try Expression Web, play with the RC1 (Release Candidate 1) release of Expression Blend, or play with the Beta1 release of Expression Design.

Express Yourself

Expression Suite is really interesting in some regards and business as usual in others. The tools share some common DNA with Visual Studio in that they're all part of the .NET 3.0 framework (forgive the occasionally incorrect terminology as we're not a Microsoft development shop - it may be more correct to say that they are built on the .NET 3.0 framework). With the exception of Media, they all communicate using a new XML-based markup language invented by Microsoft, called eXtensible Application Markup Language (XAML) (prounced zammel). The team behind Expression comes from a varied background of well-known players, including Silicon Beach (among many other things, makers of the awesome Dark Castle series of games), Avid, Adobe, Aldus, and Macromedia.

Our Expression day started off with a great intro by Angela Baxley, Product Manager (Expression), who stepped in for Erich Zocher, General Manager Tools (Expression), who couldn't make the morning. Despite her warnings about being new to the material, Angela did a great job presenting an overview of the platform based on one of the better PowerPoint decks we saw. As mentioned back on Day 2, her presentation saw a return of the equation Platform + Tools + Craft = UX, although in this case she was talking about the Platform + Tools piece while Darren was addressing the craft bit. Between Web and Blend (think ASP.NET and .NET Framework respectively) where the actual development work happens, the new platform provides the tools to build everything that a modern dev shop needs to produce.

The Value of Open Standards: XHTML vs. XAML

Most readers of our blog don't need a lecture on why web standards are important (for more information, see Web Standards on Wikipedia), nor do you need to be told that Microsoft has not exactly been known to embrace Open Standards in the past. Given that, you would presumably find yourselves equally as curious as I was to find out what was really meant by:

Expression Web is a professional design tool to create modern, standards-based sites which deliver superior quality on the Web.

Which really makes XAML all that much odder. David and I got in a debate with Arturo about whether XAML was actually an 'open standard', during which he confirmed that it was created at Microsoft and is controlled by them. By my books, that makes XAML a published file format rather than a standard and certainly not an open one by any means. This isn't a particularly new effort, as this handy Comparison of user interface markup languages tells us, and some of the projects go back ten years. We're familiar with a different XML-based approach called XUL (eXtensible User interface Language - pronounced zool as in the ancient Sumerian deity called Zuul, who you know from Ghostbusters). The cynic in me says that having Web do proper XHTML/CSS is an admission of defeat in the sense that Microsoft has been trying for years to  embrace and extend the HTML/CSS standards and maybe they've finally given up. Or maybe they got tired of people bashing the horrible HTML that came out of FrontPage and decided to fix it. Either way, standards support is almost always a good thing so yay! But then why not open up XAML or choose to contribute and work on one of the existing efforts? This is an important issue because anyone who choses to use Expression to build their applcations will be held hostage by the XAML file format and may have to make substantial changes to future versions of their software depending on what Micrsoft chooses to do with the format. Truly Open Standards are controlled by independent third parties who have (or at least appear to have) no particular bias towards any one firm and can therefore (theoretically) make decisions which drive the whole industry forward (e.g.: the W3 'owns' a number of standards including HTML and CSS). Maybe some of the Microsoft folks want to weigh in on this in the comments.

Expression Web

Web replaces FrontPage and is an effort to bring Microsoft's web design technology up to current levels by building a new application and environment rather than trying to fix the old stuff. It's designed to do HTML and XHTML, CSS formatting and code management, and XML/XLSTs, as well as to integrate closely with ASP.NET libraries for things like AJAX (via the AJAX Extensions). The demo was given by Wayne Smith, Senior Product Manager (Expression), who started with a really quick rundown of why standards are important:

1. Speed
2. Search Engine Indexing
3. Efficiency
4. Future Proofing the Web
5. It's professional!

We've spent more time cursing at InternetExplorer's lack of support for standards than most people will ever even spend in front of a browser, so this is a very welcome change in tune from the maker of the most popular browser in the world (though, I suppose, it remains to be seen how much the one hand talks to the other). I agree with all of Wayne's points here - we've been building standard compliant sites since we started the company because they just make more sense. In addition to the standards support, Web has a bunch of other great features:

• CSS Box Model: In 'design mode', the interface goes to great lengths to expose the box model (see BrainJar's CSS Positioning, or a neat-o 3D rendering by Jon Hicks). Wayne showed us how Web uses shaded borders to make the padding and margins more obvious, which you can kinda see at about 17:50 of this training video. Grab the 'crop marks' on the edge of any element to change the margin, or hold down shift and drag to change the padding.
• Style Application Mode: Web's Page Editor options allow you to toggle between having styles applied in either Auto Mode or Manual Mode, with Manual giving choices between inline, as classes in the head of this page, or as classes in an included document. You can also configure the Manual setting on different types of elements to behave differently (e.g.: apply h1...h6 styles inline but divs get styled in the included CSS).
• Multiple Doctype Support: Web supports proper doctype declarations for XHTML1.0 Transitional and Strict, which will affect the doctype output at the top of the page as well as the options in the IntelliSense code completion menus. Web also supports a Secondary Schema, consisting of various versions of InternetExplorer, which will be used to check code compatibility when rendering Quirks Mode pages.
• Style Manager: If you've ever used Word's Styles properly, then you're familiar with the way the Style Manager works. WYSIWYG previews of styles make it easy to pick the right text formatting and apply with a simple click.

Overall, I was really impressed with the product. If they ever released a version for Mac OS there's a good chance we might start using it internally (although it looked good, it didn't look good enough to run Parallels and Vista just to use it). If you're a Windows-based web shop, especially one that does ASP.NET work, you should take a look.

Expression Design

Arturo Toledo took over to show us Expression Design, a vector-based graphic design tool. I actually have no notes from his demo other than "Adobe Illustrator", which will tell you pretty much all you need to know. Challenging Adobe in this space is like trying to take them on in the Photoshop arena, which is ill-advised unless you're even bigger than they are and have mountains of cash. Which Microsoft happens to be and have. They may, in fact, be the only company out there who could reasonably stand a chance of taking any substantial market share away from the 800-pound gorrila. Right now I think you'll have a tough time ahead of you if you need to get your designers to try and switch over, unless the tools, keyboard shortcuts, and menu items mimick Illustrator pretty closely and your designers don't have to give up years of training and muscle memory. The biggest (only?) reason you would do this is to take advantage of the fact that Design can output XAML files to pull straight into Blend. That said, Mike Swanson (a Technical Evangelist with Microsoft) has released an Adobe Illustrator to XAML Export plugin with reasonably good support for the Illustrator feature set and better support coming soon (some of the unsupported features aren't available in Design or XAML), so yeah. Draw your own conclusions (get it? draw? ha!).

Expression Blend

In the same way that you can think of Web replacing FrontPage, Blend basically replaces VisualBasic. The primary intent for the Blend is to build Windows applications on the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). Arturo showed us a few demos of the kinds of things which Blend is intended for (the now defunct Microsoft Max project and the Avalon Patient Monitor specifically), which made for really cool looking interfaces with debatable practical value (like the now famous Jeff Han video). I'm always slightly suspicious of totally avant garde interfaces for medical applications which include snazzy animations and effects - when life-threatening decisions need to be made, I sure hope my doctor has to wade through flipping menus and rotating panels! - but it works very well as a proof of concept to show off how flexible Blend's toolset is. I was also slightly put off by Arturo's repeated statements that Blend finally lets you escape the tyranny of the boring gray button (and the Microsoft UX Guidelines) and map full motion video to your spinning control surfaces, which brought to mind thousands of horrendous Flashtastrophes (and one of my favourite Penny Arcade cartoons ever). At any rate, if we built Windows apps (or if WPF/E does become a potential competitor to Flash and gets widespread adoption as a browser plugin), it looks like a great environment for building interfaces. I think we, as a group, were a little confused about who it's being aimed at (see yesterday's post if you haven't already), but once we had sorted out their definition of 'designer', it all made sense. I was particularly impressed when Arturo pulled in an application that only its developer could love, built in Visual Studio, and then reskinned it without affecting the functionality (I grabbed two photos of the finished login and welcome screens). Going on personal experience, I have a suspicion that a lot of shops will end up using Blend by having their Dev team build off a spec and then having their UX/Visual team polish things, so it's great to see that the app works that way too.

Expression Media

Media is actually iView Media Pro, formerly made by iView Multimedia out of London, and acquired by Microsoft on June 27th, 2006, and is the only product in the Expression Suite which is available for Mac OS X. Media is a Digital Asset Management (DAM) Tool (which is fun to say - Dam Tool!), which basically sucks in all of your media in a whole littany of formats and then provides tagging and sorting capabilities. There's an important distinction in the DAM world between browsers (which just read the info available in the media files themselves - like EXIF data in JPEGs) and catalogues (which store their own meta data about the files and can therefore provide much easier and more efficient sorting). If you've used anything like Apple's iPhoto or Aperture, Adobe's Lightroom, or even Google's Picasa, you're familiar with the basics. Media goes further in that you can build up all kinds of ways of looking at photos, including adding custom fields (e.g.: a pro photographer might add price to track how much to charge for her images), and build collections for quick access (e.g.: all potentially good backgrounds in one area). It looked like an excellent media catalogue and something that we might make use of to store assets from different clients for easy retrieval by all of our Professional Services team members. There was some discussion about how much support was included for sharing the library files (could they be checked into a version control system? read of a network mount?) which I think was left open, so if any of the Microsoft folk know the answer, please feel free to leave a comment.

Final Expressions

I really had to work at putting myself in the mindset of a potential purchaser/user of the software since our Mac bias basically rules us out. Someone did ask Erich Zocher if there were plans to do Mac versions and there clearly aren't, which I think is a real shame. We spend a lot of time in the trenches of this industry and we're seeing more and more glowing Apples while we're down there - particularly amongst the digerati whose influence reaches far and wide

That's it for Day 4 - tune in tomorrow for the big wrap up!