If you have been referred by the Wall Street Journal, here is my take on the situation.
The Wall Street Journal has a great interview with the creators of PowerPoint. Here’s an excerpt:
Mr. Gaskins and Mr. Austin, now 63 and 60, respectively, reflected on PowerPoint’s creation and its current omnipresence in an interview last week. They are intensely proud of their technical and strategic successes. But to a striking degree, they aren’t the least bit defensive about the criticisms routinely heard of PowerPoint. In fact, the best single source of PowerPoint commentary, both pro and con, (including a rich vein of Dilbert cartoons) can be found at RobertGaskins.com, his personal home page.
Perhaps the most scathing criticism comes from the Yale graphics guru Edward Tufte, who says the software “elevates format over content, betraying an attitude of commercialism that turns everything into a sales pitch.” He even suggested PowerPoint played a role in the Columbia shuttle disaster, as some vital technical news was buried in an otherwise upbeat slide.
No quarrel from Mr. Gaskins: “All the things Tufte says are absolutely true. People often make very bad use of PowerPoint.”
Mr. Gaskins reminds his questioner that a PowerPoint presentation was never supposed to be the entire proposal, just a quick summary of something longer and better thought out. He cites as an example his original business plan for the program: 53 densely argued pages long. The dozen or so slides that accompanied it were but the highlights.
Since then, he complains, “a lot of people in business have given up writing the documents. They just write the presentations, which are summaries without the detail, without the backup. A lot of people don’t like the intellectual rigor of actually doing the work.”
One of the problems, the men say, is that with PowerPoint now bundled with Office, vastly more people have access to the program than the relatively small group of salespeople for which is was intended. When video projectors became small and cheap, just about every room on earth became PowerPoint-ready.
Now grade-school children turn in book reports via PowerPoint. The men call that an abomination. Children, they emphatically agree, need to think and write in complete paragraphs.
Still, the men don’t appreciate PowerPoint being blamed for crimes it didn’t commit. Mr. Gaskins studied a vast collection of presentations before designing the program. Bullet points, he says, existed long before PowerPoint.
While the two certainly know how to use PowerPoint, neither consider themselves true power users. They don’t even know many of the advanced features it has come to sport. They also have no patience with cubicle warriors who, in the guise of doing actual work, spend endless hours fiddling with fonts. And they like telling the joke that the best way to paralyze an opposition army is to ship it PowerPoint and, thus, contaminate its decision making, something some analysts say has happened at the Pentagon.
Both left Microsoft in the 1990s and now pursue personal projects. Mr. Austin attended every day of last week’s Apple developer conference, keeping up with the kids. While the two agree there is probably room for a PowerPoint-like program for building high-end Web sites, neither has any desire to create it.
Not being the self-promoting type, neither of the men are particularly bothered about being much less famous than their creation. Whenever they do tell a stranger what they did in life, they usually hear how much the person can’t live without the program.
If they have a lament, it’s that complaints about PowerPoint are usually not about the software but about bad presentations. “It’s just like the printing press,” says Mr. Austin. “It enabled all sorts of garbage to be printed.”
As Mr. Gaskins puts it: “If they do an inadequate job with PowerPoint, they would do just as bad using something else.”
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