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Dennis Austin, developer of PowerPoint, has died

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Re: Dennis Austin, developer of PowerPoint, has died

#31

Post by scarface_74 »

galoisscobi wrote: post #28

A strange legacy. Most of the management in my company cannot digest even simple information if it’s not on PowerPoint slides. Even when it is on preparing PowerPoint slides, text heavy slides are a big no no. Some days, more time is spent on PowerPoint slides than writing code, or actually engineering. We jokingly call presentation prep work as getting ready to push the PowerPoint to prod.

I don’t see an issue with this. I had a very technical CTO at my n-2 job who was in his 50s and would often write POCs himself in C# or Python as research.

When he wanted to see if data that we got had the information we needed he would upload it to S3 and run some Athena queries.

But I still know when he asks me some questions he just wants a very high level overview and doesn’t want the details. I’m working with him now on a side contract.

He now has graduated to using Athena, AWS glue with Python and Quicksite reports. He does that when he is “tired of dealing with product managers and all of this scrum shit”.

Re: Dennis Austin, developer of PowerPoint, has died

#32

Post by ghaff »

glandium wrote: post #11
nickpeterson wrote: post #9

powerpoint is one of those things that most people don’t think about nowadays, but before presentation software, people had to carry printouts, or slide decks for projectors, maybe laminated sheets for overhead projectors. PowerPoint has saved people a huge amount of work.

I don't think I'm particularly old (only in my 40s) but I'm old enough to have made presentations with transparent sheets on an overhead projector. I don't quite remember how I prepared those sheets (I want to say a printing tracer?).

They were often just typed/handwritten and copied onto transparencies for internal/academic stuff. It was also pretty common to use HP pen plotters for quite a while when I was working in the late 80s/90s.

We had 35mm slides for customers but that was frequently an exercise in: "Here's our roadmap but this has changed and this isn't correct" because it took effort and time to get changes made once the slide was created.

Re: Dennis Austin, developer of PowerPoint, has died

#33

Post by ftio »

nickpeterson wrote: post #9

powerpoint is one of those things that most people don’t think about nowadays, but before presentation software, people had to carry printouts, or slide decks for projectors, maybe laminated sheets for overhead projectors. PowerPoint has saved people a huge amount of work.

If you’re interested in more on this, I highly recommend the book Sweating Bullets by Robert Gaskins, the inventor/PM of PowerPoint.

Re: Dennis Austin, developer of PowerPoint, has died

#34

Post by Mistletoe »

galoisscobi wrote: post #28

A strange legacy. Most of the management in my company cannot digest even simple information if it’s not on PowerPoint slides. Even when it is on preparing PowerPoint slides, text heavy slides are a big no no. Some days, more time is spent on PowerPoint slides than writing code, or actually engineering. We jokingly call presentation prep work as getting ready to push the PowerPoint to prod.

https://www.computerworld.com/article/2468895/u-s--army-disc...

You aren’t the only one. :) I always find it fascinating and terrifying thinking about how PowerPoint may be crippling people in charge of things like nuclear weapons.

Re: Dennis Austin, developer of PowerPoint, has died

#35

Post by steve1977 »

nickpeterson wrote: post #9

powerpoint is one of those things that most people don’t think about nowadays, but before presentation software, people had to carry printouts, or slide decks for projectors, maybe laminated sheets for overhead projectors. PowerPoint has saved people a huge amount of work.

> PowerPoint has saved people a huge amount of work.

Probably not. The fact that making presentations got easier just caused many more (often unnecessary) presentations in my experience.

So at the end of the day, people spend the same amount of work without getting more results.

Re: Dennis Austin, developer of PowerPoint, has died

#38

Post by ftxbro »

i'm guessing hacker news won't put the black bar

EDIT: i'm not roasting a dead person you guys. anyway i feel like if people hate a tool it's sometimes because the tool is so good that it gets abused for every other purpose and some of those purposes aren't a good fit, it's not because the tool was bad it's the opposite.

Re: Dennis Austin, developer of PowerPoint, has died

#39

Post by Maro »

I work in a Corporate where we have lots of "strategy" teams and PPTs flying around.

What I learned is that PPT are more than a presentation format in this culture, they are a signaling tool:

• something that is "just" an email, or "just" something somebody said in a meeting doesn't carry much weight in Corporates

• .. but if you put it in a PPT with some graphics, it signals you've thought about it, and probably had some lesser minions also think about it and prepare a PPT

• .. further, if you put it in a PPT, that means you're serious about your position --- it signals commitment

• .. and finally, a PPT shows that you know how to play the game, you're not some tech weirdo that thinks PPTs are irrelevant

PPTs are a cultural currency in Corporates.

Re: Dennis Austin, developer of PowerPoint, has died

#40

Post by ghaff »

steve1977 wrote: post #35
nickpeterson wrote: post #9

powerpoint is one of those things that most people don’t think about nowadays, but before presentation software, people had to carry printouts, or slide decks for projectors, maybe laminated sheets for overhead projectors. PowerPoint has saved people a huge amount of work.

> PowerPoint has saved people a huge amount of work. Probably not. The fact that making presentations got easier just caused many more (often unnecessary) presentations in my experience. So at the end of the day, people spend the same amount of work without getting more results.

Going back many many decades my experience is that people were at least almost as bad about reading documents as they are today. The fact that people used overhead projectors and transparencies didn't change the fact that I spent a great deal of my time in meetings with slides.
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