As if the software giant didn’t have enough battles to fight, they have chosen to expand their services to offer an Adobe-like suite of applications, Expression Studio. After the recent purchase of its #1 competitor, Macromedia and the accompanying suite of multimedia development applications, Adobe is in complete control of the market. In fact, it’s difficult to even consider the name of a company that competes in the field, although names like CorelDraw do come to mind (I can’t be certain the application still exists or is being worked on). While one of the four applications included in the suite is simply a re-introduction of an old application, FrontPage, the new application suite introduces Microsoft’s Silverlight technology, or MS Flash, and their .Net platform.

The article I’ve read about the suite has some good things to say about the package, although there are some questions about the label it attempts to wear; more complete, seamless integration of the individual applications with eachother, one of the expectations of the Office Suite of Applications, and an image-editing program are needed to really start to challenge Adobe’s powerful packages. However, for the price tag and what is delivered, Microsoft seems to have done fairly well with this release, and it would seem the most important aspect of the release is a platform to push Silverlight and .Net.

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