December 19, 2003
It's not PowerPoint [ Rants ]
Was reading through the latest RISKS digest and saw a mention of NASA's shuttle crash investigation, and a New York Times article claiming that "PowerPoint Makes You Dumb". Horseshit.
I'm no Microsoft weenie, and I certainly don't care for their marketing tactics, but blaming a piece of slideshow software for an engineering and oversight failure is simply ludicrous. One of the arguments mentioned in the RISKS digest piece is that "only about 40 words fit on each slide". Just for fun, I created the following 326-word slide in my copy of PowerPoint.
Perfectly readable, no problem. PowerPoint is a tool, and you can use it however you want. The real issue here is an organizational culture where engineers aren't able to bring up critical issues and have them acted upon, not the presentation software they're using.
I do like Edward Tufte's cover art for his rant against PowerPoint, though.
Posted by edobbs at December 19, 2003 02:57 PM
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