Around the same time as PowerPoint was gaining popularity, middle management was becoming massively criticised, says Matthew Fuller, professor of cultural studies at Goldsmiths at the University of London. Fuller suggests there’s a connection: because PowerPoint let more people share their ideas, it exposed the failings of middle management and inadvertently led to an exodus of people from these roles, he says. “Perhaps their ideas could be seen for the trivia they were, to some extent.”
There's lots of hate for PowerPoint out there, but it's not really PowerPoint that people hate. PP is just a tool for arranging text and images in slide form, it's pretty anodyne. What people hate is the low quality Twitter-scale corporate thought that tends to find its natural home in slideware form (and only slideware).
Done well, slide decks can be awesome. They allow a quick read through of a presentation if you weren't able to attend the speech itself, or chose to skip it believing the additional spoken words wouldn't add much. They add colour to otherwise boring documents. When giving talks, they act as useful prompts to stop the speaker forgetting or accidentally skipping important points. Would Ed Miliband have so famously forgot to mention the UK government deficit in his key speech if he'd had a slide deck to jog his memory and keep him on track? Probably not.
Put the blame where it lies - on the vast ranks of people doing dubious non-jobs, people whose primary output is not well written essays arguing a strategy point but rather ppts that regurgitate cliches and groupthink in 12pt font, with the drawing of absurd diagrams acting as a substitute for actual work.