Business

The Best PowerPoint Slide. Ever.

in ,

"Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely" - Edward Tufte.

So, if PowerPoint is evil; the fightback begins here. Think of this as a wholesome, good karma form of industrial sabotage. All that is required is a careful (furtive) insertion of this image into various PowerPoint presentation decks belonging to either 1. You (excellent place to start) 2. Your co-workers, 3. Your boss, 4. Your competitors, 5. Your parent teacher association organiser, 6. Anyone who comes to 'present' to you at your place of work.

This should create the required disturbance in the PowerPoint forcefield and, with a little luck, force them to let go of the wheel and actually talk to you as humans without the crutch of 78 slides to make a point that should take only 3.

Please do come back and let me know how you get on with it.

*No money back guarantee and I'm not liable if you lose your job, the respect of your peers, your child's place at school, your home is at risk if you do not keep up mortgage repayments... etc. etc.

PPS. My trackbacks are not working, otherwise it would have been obvious to me sooner that this post has since been covered in the latest Geek News Central

podcast

. #blush...

PPPS. It did also occur to me that not every projector is running in English, but I don't know / haven't checked what 'No Signal' is in other languages. Also, if you wanted to be very accurate/convincing, you could copy specific projector manufacturer graphics and logos into a variety of different No Signal messages for various projectors. But that's getting too anal. Indeed, it would also be fantastically ironic to eventually end up with a multi-slide deck of countless 'No signal' slides in various languages and brands. Excellent recursion.

This was just about the idea, not so much the execution - which is easy to customise on your own for your own needs.

Geek Tragedy

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Robert X Cringely's new weekly Nerd TV grass-rootsy interview show is fantastic. This week's show is with Dave Winer and it's excellent and in particular, Winer's concise and insightful commentary on Microsoft was bang on, IMHO.

Yesterday I briefly spoke with a salesman from a UK Microsoft Partner and was somewhat irritated by his almost absolute cult-like belief that MSFT was a serial market steam-roller that nobody could defend against. The arrogance he displayed was quite remarkable and it smelled quite familiar to me.

About 15+ years ago, just before the original 'other IBM' went b'doing and when they were still trying to establish proprietary, market controlling plays like Micro Channel Architecture and OS/2, the IT reseller I worked with in Glasgow decided to sign up as an IBM PS/2 dealer.

As a young, twenty-something salesman at the time, I welcomed this development with gusto, as if somehow the IBM brand values of sheer force-in-numbers market dominance, would rub off on little old salesman me. At parties and BBQs, when asked what I did for a living, being able to say that I sold IBM kit was definitely an elite badge of honour I wore with pride. I saw that same thing yesterday from the Microsoft partner guy.

I've been harbouring increasingly doom-laden thoughts about Microsoft's future for a few years now, (including - in my professional capacity - inputs a from a brief conversation I had with Steve Ballmer in 2002 about .net and what was to become the now apparently stillborn .net MBF) , and then this morning on the commute to the office, I was listening to the podcast version of the Dave Winer NerdTV interview, where Dave was speaking about Microsoft on when I heard another piece of that jigsaw gracefully slot into place.

Dave Winer: Oh, they're always trying to go back to the old way. I mean to Microsoft, it's - the Internet, the Web is a very nasty joke. It's sort of like just the moment when you achieve complete world domination, God up there is having a really great laugh at your expense, because just at that precise moment when you're sewing the whole thing up, okay?

Bob Cringely: Yeah.

Dave: He pulls the rug out from under you, and all of a sudden none of the things that you've worked hard to gain control over matter anymore.

It's like it - I mean Bill Gates, if you study the life and the - I mean I've been listening to Bill Gates speak since 1980 was the first time heard him speak. And all the time his theme has been - I mean there's gonna be a great tragedy written about Bill Gates someday, okay? I think he is our generation's tragic figure. I mean that he - his idea - he's the son who was going to not repeat the mistakes of the father. In this case, the father being IBM.

And, well, joke's on you, Bill. You repeated the mistake. You did exactly the same thing that they did. You tried to turn the clock back. You can even find the microchannel architecture. It's called Hailstorm. You know, there was a moment when IBM said, "Okay, enough of this PC crap. We're gonna take control again, and we're gonna shut down all you cloners."
Microsoft's latest financial results saw only a 7% increase in annual revenues (all up, including acquisitions), and this is the first time in more than 20 years they've not delivered consecutive double-digit growth.

Draw your own conclusions.