From: Bruce Johnson: In general Office is a prime example of why Monopolies Are Bad. --big snip-- Powerpoint sucks giant green donkey ones. Keynote is so much better than Powerpoint it's not even funny. Just about anything is so much better than Powerpoint it's not funny.
Crayons on a white board are better.
Powerpoint is an app that's been 'enhanced' by a lodge brother with a case of the Handyman's secret weapon.
Powerpoint is the picture in the dictionary next to the word "kludge".
Powerpoint still exists only because MS has driven any other competitor out of business. I suspect that the dotcom crash wasn't caused by anything other than continual exposure to Powerpoint sapping the minds of businessmen.
Milk sours when exposed to Powerpoint, and small children scream in terror.
I wouldn't be at all surprised to find that Powerpoint has some hand in
global warming, the heartbreak of psoriasis, the break-up of the
Beatles and the death of Elvis. (yes, decades before it even existed it
was extending it's evil influence over the world!)
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Hi Bruce,
Incredibly enough, PP seems to be worst than you describe :-)
JCT
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If you think that criticisms of PowerPoint are silly, consider this: a recent New York Times (free registration required) points out that NASA's Columbia Accident Investigation Board, in its report on why the space shuttle crashed, blamed not only foam insulation but also PowerPoint! It said, "NASA, the board argued, had become too reliant on presenting complex information via PowerPoint, instead of by means of traditional ink-and-paper technical reports."
The article also cited design expert Edward Tufte, who in a "screed" notes that, "Alas, slideware often reduces the analytical quality of presentations. In particular, the popular PowerPoint templates (ready-made designs) usually weaken verbal and spatial reasoning, and almost always corrupt statistical analysis."
Microsoft has been accused of a lot of things in the past, such as creating an operating system monopoly. But changing (and worsening) the way we think is likely a new one to many.
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By the way Powerpoint was born on the Mac.
PP first saw the light as Presenter from a soft co know as Forethought from Gaskins fame. It was renamed PowerPoint, then...
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PowerPoint 1.0 went on sale in April, 1987-available only for the Macintosh, and only in black-and-white. It generated text-and-graphics pages that a photocopier could turn into overhead transparencies. (This was before laptop computers and portable projectors made PowerPoint a tool for live electronic presentations. Gaskins thinks he may have been the first person to use the program in the modern way, in a Paris hotel in 1992-which is like being the first person ever to tap a microphone and say, "Can you hear me at the back?") The Macintosh market was small and specialized, but within this market PowerPoint-the first product of its kind-was a hit. "I can't describe how wonderful it was," Gaskins says. "When we demonstrated at trade shows, we were mobbed." Shortly after the launch, Forethought accepted an acquisition offer of fourteen million dollars from Microsoft.
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In 1990, the first PowerPoint for Windows was launched, alongside Windows 3.0. And PowerPoint quickly became what Gaskins calls "a cog in the great machine." The PowerPoint programmers were forced to make unwelcome changes, partly because in 1990 Word, Excel, and PowerPoint began to be integrated into Microsoft Office-a strategy that would eventually make PowerPoint invincible-and partly in response to market research. AutoContent was added in the mid-nineties, when Microsoft learned that some would-be presenters were uncomfortable with a blank PowerPoint page-it was hard to get started. "We said, 'What we need is some automatic content!'" a former Microsoft developer recalls, laughing. "'Punch the button and you'll have a presentation.'" The idea, he thought, was "crazy." And the name was meant as a joke. But Microsoft took the idea and kept the name-a rare example of a product named in outright mockery of its target customers.
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