Dennis Austin, developer of PowerPoint, has died
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
* 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 aimed at the software and not the people who were using it to make lazy, poor presentations.
> “It’s just like the printing press,” Mr. Austin told the Wall Street Journal in 2007. “It enabled all sorts of garbage to be printed.”
Yeah. I’ll bet that all of the Microsoft office engineers feel this way, and it explains a lot about why the suite is such a bug ridden, shitty performing fucking mess.
The only thing keeping the office suite alive at this point is the enormity of the task to disrupt it.
For the last 3 places I’ve worked everything is done in Google Workspace. The only thing that Microsoft has a hold over is with Excel, that’s all anyone used from MS
Microsoft are doing their best to alienate their established userbase however, the next versions are just going to be the garbage webmail version wrapped as an app.
Excel has a 100% a strong-hold in most finance departments. I've worked with many finance professionals who's very first instinct for any type of work is to open Excel. When interacting with any data outside of Excel, they'll demand a way to get it into Excel.
To be honest: Is there an alternative?
I've been looking for a spreadsheet so that I can "drive spreadsheet from Python" rather than the usual "drive Python from spreadsheet".
As far as I can tell, that doesn't exist.
There are read-only variants to analyzed tabular data, but there seem to be none that allow me to do lots of editing in a visual way.
You might find Mito [https://www.trymito.io/] interesting. I haven’t really used it myself, but it sounds like what you’re looking for.
Key word there is low-stakes. I think Excel gets a lot of heat because it's often found used in contexts where it's wholly inappropriate to use (eg driving critical production decisions from SalesAnalysis_JimVersion_v1.8_FINAL.xlsx). That's not really Excel's fault.
I once wrote a small app to add up all shared expenses among a group of roommates and calculate how much each owed the others. It pulled together rent (recurring), various utilities (from my gmail) and one-off shared expenses (e.g. toilet paper) from a Google form/spreadsheet, added in any money owed from the prior month and generated a nice report, in what ended up being 100-200 lines of code after a few years of living together.
See https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-365-blog/in...
The killer feature was their APIs, where microsoft still sucks.
We could show them that if you put the data in sheets we could mount it from bigquery and process it from there. Or load it from a notebook.
This created a good-enough hybrid solution where spreadsheets could interact with code.
It had tanks, helicopters, and ammunitions flying.
All with sound.
It took me an embarrassingly long time to make.
Also got a graphic designer neighbor to do a title for my "movie" in AfterEffects.
Dennis Austin was the lead developer and Gaskins was the idea guy/manager.
One can also download the "Sweating Bullets..." book in PDF form for free from his website (listed in the PowerPoint History section on the main page of his website): https://www.robertgaskins.com/powerpoint-history/sweating-bu...
For Aston-Tate's dBase app, there's this blog post about its history: https://www.abortretry.fail/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-ashton-ta...
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.
I am genuinely curious. But then again, I ask the question as a computer enthusiast using a computer to talk to other computer enthusiasts about computers.
See also: https://successfulsoftware.net/2010/08/24/10-things-non-tech...
Tangential to your comment but it reminded me.
Honestly he could have written a 2-line email. He probably thought he was giving me Important Information. But as I got to know the guy I realised he was just an idiot.
Eventually it's crass refusal to do anything even mildly useful taught me the exact set of eggshells to walk on to have a somewhat usable program but the damn thing just wouldn't work. I tried everything, including uninstalling and reinstalling the entire office suite. Nothing changed. My poster was not complicated and my laptop was school issued and more than capable of running a single PowerPoint slide.
I know this is a post of a man's passing. The PowerPoint he built worked. I remember PowerPoint as a usable and fun slide making tool that was usually the highlight of relatively tedious school projects. To see the bug ridden landfill of "BI" "features" it is now is sad. I genuinely spent a day trying to download an old version that wasn't running 3 "ai" processes in the background. It was a simply disgusting experience and i will never use it again.
* word processing software * CAD software * pretty much everything adobe * Xcode * photo software
and there are probably other's
just learn figma common courtesy to your colleagues ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Apparently they used hypercard before PowerPoint, but when Apple pulled the plug, they had to move over
PowerPoint, for all its putative and/or quite real flaws and bad ... points ... is, in some sense, one of the most powerful tools in the modern world. How many decisions have hinged on PowerPoint presentations? How many decisions might have been subtly affected by aspects of the design and implementation of PowerPoint (over versions / time)? ...
It's absolutely been hugely useful at times, and, also, seemingly a preview for some Dante-style "ring of hell".
In any case, I salute Mr. Austin, offer my condolences to friends and family*, and ... well, I was going to point to a comedic take on PowerPoint that I love but it doesn't fit w/ this news, so, simply: R.I.P. Mr. Austin.
* Seriously, not just as a matter of form - I have used it for years through good and bad. I definitely feel some connection, though marginal comparatively.
What I learned is that PPT are more than a presentation format in this culture, they are a signaling tool:
• something that is "just" an email, or "just" something somebody said in a meeting doesn't carry much weight in Corporates
• .. but if you put it in a PPT with some graphics, it signals you've thought about it, and probably had some lesser minions also think about it and prepare a PPT
• .. further, if you put it in a PPT, that means you're serious about your position --- it signals commitment
• .. and finally, a PPT shows that you know how to play the game, you're not some tech weirdo that thinks PPTs are irrelevant
PPTs are a cultural currency in Corporates.
This is the point, supported by the signaling of the PPT itself.
The remaining 95% are slides that the audience doesn't care about and/or doesn't understand anyway.
The best option is probably just an html doc — mix text (real text, not bullet points) with whatever media you want. Can be viewed on every device in the world.
But the cultural factor is you signalling “I want to PRESENT something to you”. It implies this is a pitch, and you’re only seeing the notes. It’s a way to say “come talk to me”.
The information density being so low is kind of a feature.
You clearly have not met my grad school classmates who used PPTs to lead seminars, but used slides as their full-sentence speaking notes.
Slideshow presentations work, but execution is key.
Both have their place, and you could trace each to far earlier forms, such as religious iconography or clan shields, and sagas or mythic poems.
Iconography encapsulates an existing notion, or expresses an identity or affinity.
Sagas and mythic poems contain stories with characters, events, themes, morals, and other teachings, and are structured mnemonically through verse, meter, rhyme, allusion, and often musical intonation or accompaniment, to facilitate recollection both for the teller and the audience.
I'm not much of a fan of slide decks myself, largely, though as a storytelling aid they can be quite useful. That takes skill however, and instruction. Edward Tufte's suggestions for how to use slides to accompany a talk (but not substitute for it) are excellent.
Man I wonder how humanity was able to function with concepts before the PPT format was born. Surely this resulted in an explosion of productivity?
I think this is a major part of the problem. Powerpoint is so commonplace now that we cannot even conceive of different ways of presenting information to groups. If you cannot figure out how to express an idea in the medium of Powerpoint or slideware in general, then that idea is difficult to express nowadays. That limits the kind of information you can share, especially complex information that is not so easily conveyed in bullet points or in sparse infographics. "The medium is the message", in other words.
Maybe I'm old, but I remember going over a lot of information in group settings without the use of Powerpoint. Here's a few examples of alternatives:
- overhead projectors (common when I was in elementary school)
- slide projectors
- lectures and speeches
- live demonstrations
- field and laboratory work (can be very hands-on learning)
- panel discussions and debates
- group discussions (after everyone reads a book or report)
- displaying a written report on a screen rather than distinct slides (I do this myself sometimes)
Some of these aren't going to work that well if you need to convey Q3 sales figures, for example, but my point is that there are other options out there even though Powerpoint has flooded the arena. Note that you can even combine these with Powerpoint or slideware and get the best of both worlds too for that matter. I'm not against Powerpoint as much as I dislike how it is conventionally used.
(I must also note that many people, myself included, hate the "slow crawl" of having information revealed progressively. It might work sparingly for dramatic effect but having been in so many meetings with bad speakers, it is far too easily abused and always makes me ask myself "When will the speaker get to the point?").
Of course, Tufte pointed out that this can kill people.
https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=...
https://www.inf.ed.ac.uk/teaching/courses/pi/2016_2017/phil/...
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 instead of listening to me).
When I gave a colleague this feedback, he just told me that the information density is a positive thing, and then showed me a 100 page PPT from a previous job that amounted to the spec for a contract.
So, different strokes? I guess if the PPT is meant to be standalone, to not accompany a speaker, then the high information density works. I still try to convey only one major idea per slide, and I leave specs to written documents.
A final comment: the only thing for me that is personally more distracting than a high density slide is looped animation in the slide. My ADHD brain just locks onto that visual cue, and it takes serious conscious effort to keep focused on the presenter.
[edited to correct a typo]
There are two kinds of slidedeck. One that's behind you when you're presenting, and one that's shared to be viewed without the presenter. Using either in the wrong situation results in people thinking it's a 'bad powerpoint' that has either too little information because the presenter isn't there to fill in the blanks, or too much because the presenter is just reading it out.
Sure, but not always in a good way
Where I work it seems that for the execs the PPT is the product
They get credit for the PPT/presentation and zero demerits for not actually following through and delivering
For dev groups reporting up, you get more credit for a good PPT putting a spin on a shitty project than for a project well done.
PDF is what I see used when the sender is aware that not all the recipients are using Windows
One of the things I like about Google Workplace is it ended up stripping out a lot of the sort of cruft that Microsoft added over the years and ended up with components that are more streamlined for my generally fairly simple needs.
Not sure which of those had vector graphics in the same style as modern PowerPoint (Storyboard was bitmapped), and whether old PowerPoint already had vector graphics.
Harvard Graphics truly was horrible to work with. Very unintuitive. PowerPoint felt like a revelation in comparison.
I don't think it's bad. I like written, long form content. It just is very far from what I know.
It feels really disrespectful to waste my time, when I've bothered reading the preparatory material, because X number of other attendees haven't. And, presumably, for Amazon to do this for every single meeting, it must have been commonplace for folks to not manage their time effectively to get prepared for the meetings they attend? Quite a bizarre approach.
Or a pragmatic one. Also I imagine there are other positive side effects like preparing a focus for the topic at hand. And 5 minutes, or even shorter might be enough for most topics I think. Better than people pretending they know what is going on.
source: worked at Amazon and was told this by my boss
From a personal point of view, however, I instinctively dislike the idea: trying to process and evaluate material in public is stressful, chiefly because it is so often in my experience presented in bad faith. The slightest expression of positivity is immediately twisted into unwavering enthusiasm and complete consent, and a hint of misunderstanding is used as justification to discard any further criticism! You have to really trust your colleagues to allow yourself to learn, be confused and risk making mistakes in their company. But if the workplace really does have that non-competitive culture, it is surely the most efficient way of conducting meetings, possibly the best combination of written preparation and live collaboration.
+ helped many communicate
+ made it easier to miscommunication thereby;
tying manager types into harmless video games was probably a net win for the world
My HS teacher had elaborate combinations of transparencies that he would layer on top of each other. The upper layers containing hand-drawn marker annotations.
It feels better than using Powerpoint.
We had 35mm slides for customers but that was frequently an exercise in: "Here's our roadmap but this has changed and this isn't correct" because it took effort and time to get changes made once the slide was created.
I’m in my early thirties and we sometimes used transparent sheets on overhead projector too when I was in school. Although in our case we made the sheets with the computer (Microsoft Word, Paint, etc) and they gave us transparent sheets that we put in the printer. I remember that the ink on the transparent sheets would smudge if we touched it, which sometimes accidentally happened when we handled our transparent sheets.
Even in high school I sometimes saw teachers use overhead projection with transparent sheets.
One of my math teachers in high school brought a special device with him one day. This one https://www.calculatorsource.com/ti-89titanium-vs.html (or some other model by TI). It’s an external screen that you connect to a TI graphing calculator and then put it on top of the glass plate of an overhead projector so that you can project what the calculator is showing for everyone to see :)
Apple invested in the company (Forethought, Inc) before Microsoft aquired it in 1987.
Probably not. The fact that making presentations got easier just caused many more (often unnecessary) presentations in my experience.
So at the end of the day, people spend the same amount of work without getting more results.
It’s also taken the place of the business letter and some other formerly-common office document formats. I’m not convinced it’s saving time, just creating more junk. Which is how I feel about a lot of application of tech, actually—I suspect huge productivity gains in some narrow cases mask that most tech use is somewhere between a lot worse and only slightly better than whatever it replaced.
A little bit of investigation revealed that PowerPoint slide decks and other multimedia was consuming the increased storage since Exchange made it much easier to send large attachments to others.
Even when it is on preparing PowerPoint slides, text heavy slides are a big no no.
Some days, more time is spent on PowerPoint slides than writing code, or actually engineering. We jokingly call presentation prep work as getting ready to push the PowerPoint to prod.
When he wanted to see if data that we got had the information we needed he would upload it to S3 and run some Athena queries.
But I still know when he asks me some questions he just wants a very high level overview and doesn’t want the details. I’m working with him now on a side contract.
He now has graduated to using Athena, AWS glue with Python and Quicksite reports. He does that when he is “tired of dealing with product managers and all of this scrum shit”.
They brought him in to build out an internal team to remove their dependence on the consulting company. I was his second technical hire. He wanted to make everything “cloud native” for HA and scalability reasons. We sold access to micro services to large health care providers.
We just talked during the interview. No leetCode, no techno trivia and I came up with my proposals and even though he knew I had no practical experience with AWS, later on he told me he thought I was a smart guy and could figure it out.
Two years later when a little worldwide pandemic hit and people were hammering our services, they didn’t miss a beat.
After I basically “put myself out of a job” and had done everything I was initially hired to do, I got bored and got a job at AWS in the Professional Services Department.
Three years later, the company we worked for had had an exit, he moved on to another company and I got Amazoned. I called him up and we talked about some problem he was having with an Amazon Connect (call center) implementation. It was a service I knew well and he offered me a consulting contract on my last day at AWS.
FWIW: I also got another full time job two weeks later.
I don’t see anyone else giving me the opportunity that he originally gave me to lead his “transformation” vision. He knew I had never opened the AWS console when he hired me.
I was just getting out of the military, and trying to find what was next. I had no internships or previous engineering experience. The most I could speak to was some comp sci classes I was currently taking for my MS, and a background in excel. He didn’t grill me with leetcode. There wasn’t really even an interview. We just talked about big picture ideas for 45 minutes. And then he told me he wanted me on board. Keep in mind this was at a large, well known unicorn - hiring didn’t normally work like that was but somehow he just sort of made it happen.
The code base was in Java. I had never written Java, but he knew that and told me I’d probably figure it out. The team also didn’t have the bandwidth to upskill someone as junior as I was. I appreciated the opportunity to sink or swim and prove myself.
Unlike Amazon that is “irrationally malevolent”. But I knew that going in. I made my money. Learned what I could. Put it on my resume and let it open some doors.
I don’t mean to come off bitter. It was a completely transactional decision to go to AWS and it served its purpose.
Then when things aren’t going expected, we make more slides on why it’s not going as expected instead of allocating time to do the engineering work that’s needed to course correct.
You aren’t the only one. :) I always find it fascinating and terrifying thinking about how PowerPoint may be crippling people in charge of things like nuclear weapons.
https://mcdreeamiemusings.com/blog/2019/4/13/gsux1h6bnt8lqjd...
It’s not just “ICs” getting this impression.
God, I miss the old internet, when you could say something like that and actually mean it.
Oral History of Dennis R. Austin, 2015
May his memory be eternal.
EDIT: i'm not roasting a dead person you guys. anyway i feel like if people hate a tool it's sometimes because the tool is so good that it gets abused for every other purpose and some of those purposes aren't a good fit, it's not because the tool was bad it's the opposite.
o Born
o Developed PowerPoint
o Died
... died of too many bullet points
(I'll see myself out)
I don't know anyone using Google Slides (never knew that even existed). So I guess not everyone.