There Is No Cat - Power corrupts; PowerPoint corrupts absolutely

A huge orangupoid, which no man can conquer

Thursday, January 30, 2003

Power corrupts; PowerPoint corrupts absolutely

Dori at BackupBrain points to an article that asks if PowerPoint is the Devil.

The answer, of course, is yes.

I don't know whether it's a lack of oxygen at the rarified heights of the corporate hierarchy or what, but I've noticed that people who use PowerPoint too much lose the ability to think complex thoughts. If it can't be expressed in a bullet list, it's not worth considering. I've been asked by executroids if I could prepare the drawings I was using for technical manuals in PowerPoint so they could use them more easily. My reply was that yes, I could, and I could also drive nails with a screwdriver, but it was likely to be painful and was not the best tool for the job. PowerPoint muddles the thinking of otherwise intelligent, personable people. If I had my way, it would be classified as a Schedule II Narcotic, because once addicted, people seem to keep coming back for more. I've been making this point for years, so it was interesting to see that the article addressed pretty much the same concern.

Posted at 7:28 AM

Comments

Note: I’m tired of clearing the spam from my comments, so comments are no longer accepted.

Heh. I think the only software product I hate worse than PowerPoint is Front Page.

Posted by Deb at 1:49 AM, January 31, 2003 [Link]

Me too, although Front Page wasn't always the awful bloated mess it is now. I remember seeing it demonstrated by the company that originally wrote it, Vermeer Technologies, at Internet World in Boston, probably around 1995-6, and being reasonably impressed. It was one of the first tools to attempt to make web creation a little simpler. The Microsoft bought it, and bolted all sorts of crap on the side. Feh.

But then, I still use BBEdit, a text editor, to do most of my web development....

Posted by ralph at 6:46 AM, January 31, 2003 [Link]

yep. i use notepad. although i've been thinking to moving to something like TopStyle for stylesheets which, quite frankly, are a pain in the ass in notepad.

Posted by deb at 2:01 PM, January 31, 2003 [Link]

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What do you mean there is no cat?

"You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat."

- Albert Einstein, explaining radio