Stefano Demiliani WeBlog

The Express Mania...

With the Express Family announce at TechEd Europe, Microsoft has attracted the attention of all the developers community (Pro MS and not).

This is an important fact on the Microsoft strategy... with these family of products, MS can attract the attention also from little developers that maybe wants to start building application for the MS world but that cannot build their personal MSDN license because it's too expensive (I'm thinking about students, hobbists or people who like programming in general).

If this product will be free (like SQL Server Express 2005) or with a sensible low cost (I hope lots about 100$) the Express Family will be a great success. Not only the normal MS developer could be attracted by this family of products, but expecially the hobbist that, at the actual moment, could be oriented to other "worlds" (such as pirated software or open source).

I think also that the Express could have a side effect... someone could start his experience on the development world with an Express product, improve his experience with a low cost and, in a second time, start thinking to do more seriously and pass to Visual Studio 2005. If this people was forced to start his development experience with VS2005, maybe he never started this.

MS, this is the right road... keep the price to a sensible low level and the success will be sure!