September 24th, 2009
35 slides in 20 minutes !
The man from the Bank of England that spoke at a recent event I attended really liked his slides!! We had data heavy slides on GDP, output, employment, house prices, inter bank lending rates, debt levels, liquidity, equity prices exchange rates…and on and on.. His message was essentially that in the Bank of England’s view, things are improving –slightly. They think that over the next 3 years, growth could be anything from -2% to +5% ( nothing like hedging your bets.. bit like saying rain possible in an English weather forecast !) . Were all these slides really necessary? Especially given a mixed audience only a small proportion of whom were in finance ? Surely the message about a slight recovery could have been conveyed in a more engaging way that didn’t involve bombarding us with graphs. Perhaps he could have picked the top 10 indicators and talked a little more about each of them ? In my mind this data dump of a speech was made worse by the stark contrast with this man’s boss. The Governor himself had spoken at that same venue a few months before and had spoken for a good 45 minutes without a PPT slide in sight.
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August 20th, 2009
JULY 1987 The New York Times
Microsoft Buys Software Unit
The Microsoft Corporation announced its first significant software acquisition today, paying $14 million for Forethought Inc. of Sunnyvale, Calif.
Forethought makes a program called Powerpoint that allows users of Apple Macintosh computers to make overhead transparencies or flip charts. Some industry officials think such “desktop presentations” have the potential to be as big a market as “desktop publishing,” which involves using computers to lay out newsletters and other publications. Microsoft is already the leading software supplier for the Macintosh.
This was how PowerPoint was first announced to the world, now 25 years on from its invention apparently 500 million people worldwide use PPT and it turns over $100m a year and is one of the most pervasive peices of software in the world !
To many now PowerPoint is nothing but an irritation, providing endless bullet points, annoying animations and totally tedious presentations… death by PowerPoint! “A poor workman blames his tools”. This age old adage is absolutely relevant to this modern technology. PowerPoint is great, it’s how people chose to use it that is the problem ! Used a tool for quality visual aids it is fantastic. BUT, used as a script, used as speaker notes, used as a handout and most times as a combination of all of the above.. it is not great.. So on it’s 25th anniversaru let’s not give the tool a hard time but rather look to ourselves and how we use it.
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