Robert Scoble has an interesting post about Microsoft's need to monetize first, build second. His point is how Google seems to be adopting that strategy. I don't disagree with Robert but that isn't my point here.
When I first heard that Expression wasn't going to be included in MSDN this is the first thing that came to mind. I imagined some executive asking the team how they were going to pay for themselves. I imagined that team arguing that they'd never be able to hit their revenue targets if nobody bought a copy of Expression the first year because they already had it in MSDN.
That may not be what happened. But it sure sounds like a reasonable thing. And that pisses me off because it misses the point. It is too short sighted. Sometimes (maybe most of the time) it makes sense to require teams to justify their existence by making them think about revenue first. After all, startups can't survive very long on negative cash flow. Contrary to Bubble 1.0 conventional wisdom.
But the value of some products is much greater than the direct contribution to the bottom line. Expression is exactly that type of product. Without making Expression available to the widest possible audience Microsoft is going to have a much tougher time selling people on the .NET 3.0 platform.
Consider this: The WPF MVP's won't have a copy of Expression Suite. In what universe does that make sense? How does that promote the WPF platform.
After spending some time with Expression Blend I think I will have to invest the $450 in the Expression Suite upgrade dance. But I'm still not happy about it. I'd much rather see Microsoft make Expression Blend available to as wide an audience as possible. As far as I'm concerned they should give a copy away for the first 6 months to everyone who owns a copy of Photoshop or Illustrator. This is not a time to be cheap Microsoft.