Apart from being useful for presentations, Powerpoint is still my go-to for mockups - screw Figma, I can achieve 80% of the result in 20% of the time.
Dennis Austin, developer of PowerPoint, has died
121–130 of 180 posts
Re: Dennis Austin, developer of PowerPoint, has died
#122One 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.
If there's a meeting and most, but not all, of the folks read the document, then there's the potential they'll have to wait while the others read the document. To avoid that eventuality, the convention is that no one reads the document until the meeting, and then there's no wasted time.
source: worked at Amazon and was told this by my boss
Re: Dennis Austin, developer of PowerPoint, has died
#123I hope his funeral has a slide presentation with some amazing animations and sound effects! :)
You should see his marriage proposal. Joking aside, I worked for a big corporation once where our project manager's emails were literally blank, with the actual message in an attached powerpoint.
Some people don't understand that you can attach just an image file to an email. I often get Word attachments containing a single image.
Re: Dennis Austin, developer of PowerPoint, has died
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nice anecdote. Microsoft 365 has triple the market share of GSuite. The world still runs on Excel and PowerPoint.
In which countries...
The rich ones. All of Wall Street runs on Excel. All of management consulting runs on PowerPoint. Private equity runs on both.
Re: Dennis Austin, developer of PowerPoint, has died
#125Everyone 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.
Possibly. Yet I never used PowerPoint.
Re: Dennis Austin, developer of PowerPoint, has died
#126Dennis Austin dies at 76. * Born in Pittsburgh, studied engineering at the University of Virginia * Collaborated with Robert Gaskins at Forethought to create PowerPoint * Forethought acquired by Microsoft * By 1993, PowerPoint generating more than $100 million in sales * Product is widely used, but controversial and target of jokes > Mr. Austin and Gaskins acknowledged the complaints, but thought they were unfairly a…
Robert Gaskins wrote an interesting book on the development of Powerpoint and the collaboration with Apple and Microsoft.
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Re: Dennis Austin, developer of PowerPoint, has died
#127[dead]
Re: Dennis Austin, developer of PowerPoint, has died
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
Video is usually more effective for asynchronous presentations. Powerpoint is great for spoken presentations where everyone is in the same room. But they generally suck as summary reports. For thinking and analysis word docs are superior. For asynchronous presentation video is superior. Video allows you to control the timing and framing in a way that a slide deck cannot. The main downside to videos is that they are h…
Most good video presentations include a ppt or the equivalent. A video is just a spoken presentation that’s recorded, like a live spoken presentation it can include visual aids or not, it’s still a spoken presentation. You may confusing categories of things, or maybe I’m too used to seeing ppt with slides containing embedded video.
Just as a movie can go far beyond being a recording of a theatrical play, a video presentation can offer far more possibilities than simply being a recording of a slide presentation. It can allude to possibilities that are closer to experience and convey a sense of reality that a slide deck can’t achieve.
Re: Dennis Austin, developer of PowerPoint, has died
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Yeah, you're a tech weirdo. Don't out yourself this easily. Don't talk about "your brain" and ADHD and "information density" and all that. It's better to conceal your power level in the corporate world. If you want to play with the corporate chads, you need to play by the rules, however awful those rules may be.
Heh I work in a very large corp everyone here knows and deal with 70-80 slide decks more than code these days and also happen to be named Chad ;)
Re: Dennis Austin, developer of PowerPoint, has died
#130Dennis Austin dies at 76. * Born in Pittsburgh, studied engineering at the University of Virginia * Collaborated with Robert Gaskins at Forethought to create PowerPoint * Forethought acquired by Microsoft * By 1993, PowerPoint generating more than $100 million in sales * Product is widely used, but controversial and target of jokes > Mr. Austin and Gaskins acknowledged the complaints, but thought they were unfairly a…
Thank you for making a proper slide for this. (Suggestion: Remove "." from slide title.)