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Dennis and I overlapped at Tandem Computers in the early 1980s, but we didn't meet until 2003, when we were both members of a small private club of computer geezers. In addition to being a great software designer he was one of the nicest and most thoughtful people I've ever met.
Computer Geezers would make an awesome band name.
One aspect of Amazon culture I’ve enjoyed is that meetings are document driven, and PPTs are rare, even non existent. Meetings start with dedicated reading time. It feels like PPT engendered this false sense of communication by making it easier to bullet-ize and visualize. PPT in practice lowers the critical thinking required of presenters and presentees.
Why do meetings start with dedicated reading time? Did people always come unprepared? How can I imagine this? Is it like: "Hey folks, thanks for showing up. This is the document we'll be discussing in 20min. Please read it now?". I don't think it's bad. I like written, long form content. It just is very far from what I know.
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…
The classic corporate PPT slide is a disaster of over-information! I try hard to keep my slides short, with text that is a jumping off point for my actual presentation, but my effort to teach this method has mostly fallen on deaf ears. When the information density is high, or there is a just a lot of text, then the audience reads the slide instead of listening to the speaker (that is, they're reading the slide instea…
There are two kinds of slidedeck. One that's behind you when you're presenting, and one that's shared to be viewed without the presenter. Using either in the wrong situation results in people thinking it's a 'bad powerpoint' that has either too little information because the presenter isn't there to fill in the blanks, or too much because the presenter is just reading it out.
Dennis and I overlapped at Tandem Computers in the early 1980s, but we didn't meet until 2003, when we were both members of a small private club of computer geezers. In addition to being a great software designer he was one of the nicest and most thoughtful people I've ever met.
If you want to read about the development of PowerPoint by its visionary, you can checkout the book Sweating Bullets by Robert Gaskins: https://amzn.to/3PvTvF0 Dennis Austin was the lead developer and Gaskins was the idea guy/manager.
"Sweating Bullets", "Almost Perfect" ( http://www.wordplace.com/ap/ ), "The Autodesk File" ( https://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/e5/ ) and "Show Stopper!" were a few books that I think pair very well, and as a developer who wasn't around in the time really gave interesting and comparable insights into the development of a few really important companies and pieces of software.
For Aston-Tate's dBase app, there's this blog post about its history: https://www.abortretry.fail/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-ashton-ta...
Everyone is using Google Slides though now, no? So much so that my boss always says "Prepare some slides for the meeting" and not "Prepare a power point".
Everyone is using Google Slides though now, no? So much so that my boss always says "Prepare some slides for the meeting" and not "Prepare a power point".
Nice anecdote. Microsoft 365 has triple the market share of GSuite. The world still runs on Excel and PowerPoint.
Everyone is using Google Slides though now, no? So much so that my boss always says "Prepare some slides for the meeting" and not "Prepare a power point".
I don't know anyone using Google Slides (never knew that even existed). So I guess not everyone.