More Media Disappointments from Microsoft

I have been eagerly waiting the release of Expression Media from Microsoft in the hopes, and their promise, that it would give me a truly professional media management tool for my media library which consists of over 10,000 music tracks and 10s more thousands of photographs. Well, it finally became available so I downloaded and installed it.

In the fashion that I should have known to expect from Microsoft recently, Expression Media is a huge disappointment. Its user interface shows worse and more amateurish flaws than the Windows Media Player 11 user interface.

It was clear within 10 minutes that Expression Media is totally and completely useless. First, it has a media catalog size limit of 128,000 files (plenty big for me) and 2GB of disk space - not even a drop in the bucket of what I need to catalog. As has been stated on the Expression Media newsgroups, this limitation shows that Expression Web is nothing more than a relic of ages gone by.

In case you're not aware, none of the "new" Microsoft Expression series applications are new at all. Microsoft purchased them from another company and simply tweaked the appearance some, removed some features, and released them with no new enhancements and no bug fixes - including the long-complained-about catalog size limitation.

In fact, Microsoft has managed to add a few new bugs to the mix in their rush to get to market. It sort of reminds me, in that regard, of Windows Media Player 11 and Visual Studio Team Suite for Database Professionals - both products with great potential that were rushed to market with flaws that make them very frustrating to use.

Here are some screenshots taken from my first minute with Expression Media. You can see what I mean about how bad the product really is going to be. This first image is of the very first view I got of Expression Media upon opening for the first time:


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Thinking I was smart, I hit the enter key to get past the licensing screen that is unusable. That just got me to more of the same:


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Finally, after getting the application to open, I tried Help->About to get version info, etc. for posting in the newsgroups. That didn't work any better than the previous screens:


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Let's face it. This is just not ready for prime time. As the program manager stated that they did with Visual Studio Team Suite for Database Professionals (VSTS DBPro), Microsoft appears to have taken an iterative development process with Express Media. You'll have to pay now and wait for the next version if you want one that actually works. Said version is not out yet for VSTS DBPro. Who knows how long before a working version of Expression Media will be released. When the VSTS DBPro program manager said what he did about iterative development in a Microsoft forum, I asked if we could pay iteratively. Of course, he didn't answer that.

Iterative development is a great methodology for internal business applications where you can give the customer something quickly and fill in the holes later on. With commercial retail software, this amounts to nothing more than, in my opinion, a rip-off. You pay for what the program manager thinks the product will become but you have no guarantees. And usually it will not become that what the vision is anyway. My suggestion is to not buy Expression Media now. Save your money.
- posted by Dale Preston @ 5/27/2007 04:28:00 PM