Microsoft PowerPoint, the most popular tool in sales meetings and corporate boardrooms, turns 20 today.
Lee Gomes of WSJ meets with Robert Gaskins and Dennis Austin, the original creators of PowerPoint who sold it to Microsoft for $14 million in 1987.
They hate school children using PowerPoint as “children need to think and write in complete paragraphs.”
If they have a lament, it’s that complaints about PowerPoint are usually not about the software but about bad presentations. “It’s just like the printing press,” says Mr. Austin. “It enabled all sorts of garbage to be printed.”
One of the problems, the men say, is that with PowerPoint now bundled with Office, vastly more people have access to the program than the relatively small group of salespeople for which is was intended.
When video projectors became small and cheap, just about every room on earth became PowerPoint-ready. Link
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