from the on-his-way-with-many-who-have-seen-his-product-too-many-times dept.
Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
Dennis Austin, co-creator of the ubiquitous if not quite universally-loved presentation software PowerPoint, is dead at 76. With Robert Gaskins, Austin developed the software for Forethought, which led Microsoft to buy the company so that it could include the app in its core Office suite. Though many know Austin's magnum opus from long and perhaps unnecessary workplace meetings, PowerPoint has its fans, including David Byrne:
There's a lot of criticism of PowerPoint" — for encouraging users to do things in a particular way and discouraging them from other things, such as putting more than seven bullet points on a slide, he acknowledged. "But if you can't edit it down to seven, maybe you should think about talking about something else." PowerPoint restricts users no more than any other communication platform, he asserted, including a pencil: "When you pick up a pencil you know what you're getting — you don't think, 'I wish this could write in a million colors.'"…
(Score: 4, Informative) by looorg on Monday September 11 2023, @12:27AM (7 children)
What is the (in-)appropriate clipart for this presentation ...
While the piece of software might be universally loved by the office drones, but I doubt it, the presentations are not, I'm certain of this. The person that made the presentation probably had more fun then all the people that are now expected to survive the viewing experience. I think I preferred it when presentations were handwritten on whiteboards and/or on film and with overhead projector. It took time to make so you wanted to cut down on the number of pages. Sitting thru the power point slides is just soulcrushing. Oh look Office Bob just made another 96 page presentation with clipart and colours all while using every single transition in the program ... oh joy!
I wonder what killed more office hours (and productivity), Tetris, Solitaire or Power Point ...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 11 2023, @12:34AM (1 child)
Don't forget Minesweeper.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Tuesday September 12 2023, @08:50PM
Who can forget the Minesweeper Certified Solitaire Expert (MCSE).
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Reziac on Monday September 11 2023, @02:51AM (4 children)
Powerpoint allowed disorganized management drones to appear organized and succinct.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Mykl on Monday September 11 2023, @03:34AM (3 children)
Which is why it forms part of the unholy trinity. 95% of executives use exactly 3 productivity applications on their computers: Outlook, Excel and PowerPoint. Once you add a browser, you're pretty close to 100% usage.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Reziac on Tuesday September 12 2023, @12:40AM (2 children)
I'm astonished that one is Excel. Who sets up the formulas for them??!
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Mykl on Tuesday September 12 2023, @03:54AM (1 child)
In my experience, there are two use cases:
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Tuesday September 12 2023, @05:23AM
Ah, that sounds far more believable. :)
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 4, Funny) by jb on Monday September 11 2023, @05:56AM
...to suggest that the cause may have been "death by PowerPoint"?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by turgid on Monday September 11 2023, @07:22AM (4 children)
Back in the day, Microsoft was kind of a joke software company. MS-DOS was atrocious. Windows was rubbish, and they tried to write applications for Windows which were nothing short of an embarrassment. The main applications of the day were things like Lotus 1-2-3, WordPerfect, Harvard Graphics and dBase. Borland even had their own office suite and Lotus tried branching out into those sorts of things, including word processors.
PowerPoint was by no means the first presentation graphics application. In fact, it was one of the last. What Microsoft did was shrewd marketing, sinking loads of money in (they did it with the XBox too), abusing their operating system monopoly and waiting for the competition to fail. I remember reviews of Microsoft Project too. It was atrocious.
All of the Microsoft applications nowadays and for a couple of decades have been the de facto industry standards.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 11 2023, @03:18PM (3 children)
Back in the day, we used markers on transparencies with an overhead projector to convey ideas. The information was paramount. It got us to the moon.
Then came powerpoint, and style trumped substance, and the world went to hell in a handbasket. I miss the days of no style.
Just try to find an overhead projector nowadays.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Monday September 11 2023, @04:13PM
I remember those and did indeed use them on occasion.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by richtopia on Monday September 11 2023, @08:38PM
If you want to return to this style, the technique I've found is a camera over the desk (assuming a virtual medium). This is like a talking hands YouTube video, but you can print off your "slides" on standard printer paper. This allows you to articulate emotion through hand motion, and marking slides with pens/highlighters is intuitive - better than someone trying to draw with a mouse.
(Score: 1) by cereal_burpist on Tuesday September 12 2023, @04:01AM
He/She hasn't been very active lately. [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2, Interesting) by pTamok on Monday September 11 2023, @07:30AM (2 children)
Marking the death of the creator of PowerPoint is a bit like marking the death of the inventor of crack-cocaine, or crystal-meth. PowerPoint is insanely popular, but how much it contributes to productivity is still an open question. There is a long running puzzle about use of computers in general, in that despite their widespread use, productivity growth has remained stuck at pre-computerisation levels. ( OECD: Digitalisation and productivity [oecd.org], also, from 1998 (this has been going on for some time) Have Computers Made Us More Productive? A Puzzle [stlouisfed.org])
Now I won't lay the blame purely at use of PowerPoint. It is an enduring puzzle that the productivity gains expected from use of IT have not shown up in economic statistics, and a lot of analysis has gone into trying to find out why. There are lots of articles on the Internet talking about it.
PowerPoint makes it easy to put together a presentation. You no longer need to spend hours putting together hand-made posters. I would suggest PowerPoint didn't make it much easier to produce good presentations, though. Tufte made some well known criticism of PowerPoint in 2003 ([pdf] Tufte 2003: The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint [ed.ac.uk]. This is also an interesting article: The Guardian: Andrew Smith: How PowerPoint is killing critical thought [theguardian.com].
I've used PowerPoint a lot. The implementation is pretty good*, so well done to the programmer. Whether it is being used appropriately is another matter.
*I don't know about current versions, but certainly, older versions made it obscenely difficult to create portable presentations that included video content.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 11 2023, @11:28AM
> It is an enduring puzzle that the productivity gains expected from use of IT have not shown up in economic statistics, and a lot of analysis has gone into trying to find out why. There are lots of articles on the Internet talking about it.
This was interesting to me because, in my personal case (very small family engineering company), adding personal computers meant a huge productivity increase for me (starting in early 1980s). For example, my father (who quit a management position and started the company in the 1970s) maintained a large correspondence but used dictation and a secretary to do it. With a computer, I was not only able to maintain my own correspondence, but once the internet and email came along also a major portion of his correspondence as well.
As you note, there are plenty of articles on this topic. This one from 25 years ago is easy to read but broad enough to (imo) cover the problem:
https://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/regional-economist/october-1998/have-computers-made-us-more-productive-a-puzzle [stlouisfed.org]
It suggests many causes but for a tl;dr version I'll take two: The accounting doesn't properly track computer-related productivity--this is often the case in large companies where losers and gainers are stuck together (at the level seen by top managers). Second, depending on how the employees shared the wealth from increased productivity seemed to make a large difference--companies that shared the wealth around to both salaried and hourly employees (white and blue collar) often reported much higher gains in productivity. When all employees benefit from the productivity increase, then there is more increase.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 11 2023, @04:14PM
Every time you make a PowerPoint, Edward Tufte kills a kitten.