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General Stanley McChrystal (WIRED 03.15), the leader of Nato and US forces in Afghanistan, was once confronted with an intricate PowerPoint slide detailing American military strategy. "Once we understand that," he said, "we'll have won the war."
This was not the first time someone had complained about a PowerPoint slide, and it would not be the last. But his statement was more profound than he knew, because the real mystery is not so much, "Why is that slide so complicated?" but more, "How come the Army is using PowerPoint?" Or indeed, "How come almost every organisation in the world is using PowerPoint to communicate almost everything to almost everybody?" That's the real question. How come PowerPoint is everywhere? How has it been so successful for so long? How has nothing ever replaced it? Once we've understand that, we'll have understood the modern world.
Microsoft claims PowerPoint has been installed more than a billion times. Very few of those installs were free. People paid for it. They still do. You could make a compelling case that PowerPoint is one of the most influential pieces of software ever created. Yet its role is to be the butt of jokes, the instigator of sighs, groans and eye-rolling. PowerPoint has been blamed for declining standards of literacy, corporate failure and the Columbia disaster in 2003. "Death by PowerPoint" was meant, in that case, literally.
The anthropologist and designer Georgina Voss explains PowerPoint's success in this way: "PowerPoint has become the default for what a presentation is - more than just 'Biro' or 'Hoover' describing any ballpoint pen or vacuum cleaner, but actually moulding in its affordances and use behaviours such that using any non-PowerPoint program becomes more difficult. People in the global north who have come through standard schooling and workplaces understand, broadly, how to use PowerPoint."
PowerPoint is so dominant that most of its rivals - Keynote, Google Slides - aren't challenging its basic model: linear flow, one "slide" at a time, images and words.
Katrina Sluis is the digital curator at London's Photographers' Gallery. In January 2016, she put on a show featuring artists and thinkers "responding" to PowerPoint. She believes PowerPoint has also been surfing a cultural wave for the past 29 years: the growing importance of the image. "It's the arrival of visual speech, in a way, which you kind of see with the camera phone," she says. "And the way in which, in the attention economy, the image is reified. Images have a kind of rhetorical power in contemporary culture now."
Sluis's show reveals something about PowerPoint - that it lets you share ideas by playing with images. "It's therapeutic," she says. "PowerPoint mixes the corporate with the possibility of creativity and personal expression. I wonder if that explains its persistence, the tension between corporate aesthetics and the potential to insert a slide of your kids to hammer your message home."
Stefanie Posavec is a designer and illustrator based in Brixton, London. She works with clients big and small, and says that they all have one thing in common - PowerPoint. It's the design tool that everyone has. "If you design something for somebody, they say, 'I don't have a design program, but I do I have PowerPoint. Can you make me a brochure that works in PowerPoint so I can change it? - because that's the only way that I know how to work with images,'" explains Posavec.
As a way to work with images, it's pretty damn good. It can't do everything, but it does enough. The singer and artist David Byrne loves the way it lets you work with images quickly - and he enjoys its restraints: "When you pick up a pencil you know what you're getting - you don't think, 'I wish this could write in a million colours,'" he says.
PowerPoint is how organisations communicate. Email someone a PowerPoint file and there's a high chance that they'll be able to open it. Most organisational knowledge is probably stored in PowerPoint files. Microsoft understands this power, of course, and it works very hard to make PowerPoint backward compatible. You can open a PowerPoint 3.0 file from 1992 in today's version on an iPad Pro and all the animations will run just as intended.
PowerPoint's versatility and ubiquity means that it is now used for everything, not just presentations. As a result, organisational aesthetics have shifted from the traditional vertical "portrait" world of the A4 document to the horizontal "landscape" world of the desktop monitor - and the PowerPoint slide print-out. All the words that used to go into a document now get crammed on to a slide.
Robert Gaskins, inventor of PowerPoint, never intended that. As he told The Wall Street Journal in 2007: "A lot of people have given up writing documents. They just write presentations, which are summaries without the detail." He was never guilty of that himself. The business plan for PowerPoint was 53 densely worded pages, with a dozen accompanying slides.
If you're a presentation nerd, you will have found your way to the archives of robertgaskins.com and discovered a meticulous, creative and imaginative man. The kind of man who invents a piece of groundbreaking software, retires, discovers an enthusiasm for the concertina and immediately builds concertina.com, a comprehensive and detailed resource for concertinists everywhere.
Your inner-presentation nerd may also be delighted to discover that he's written a history of PowerPoint called Sweating Bullets. And you'll read it and realise that the real story is not the one you were imagining.
Robert Gaskins invented the software while presentations were still being done with slides and overhead projectors. He imagined an age of visual computing and created a tool that would exploit it. He concentrated on creating a tool for self-expression and built a product, that, arguably, led the adoption of graphical user interface (GUI) computing - not one that piggybacked on top of it.
Gaskins' first big and non-obvious idea was the amount of creative control he would put in the hands of his users. "The primary benefit that PowerPoint aimed at, from the start, was to put effective control of presentations into the hands of people who were expressing their own ideas," he tells WIRED. "Before personal computers, presenters worked through secretaries and graphics 'producers', and then early personal computers were similarly used for presentations through technical specialists (except by a few enthusiasts).
All these intermediaries frequently blurred the message and introduced delays that made it impractical to get everything correct. I thought that 'visual' personal computers, such as the Mac and Windows PCs, would make it possible for the people who had the ideas to produce all the material for their own presentations, so as to express their ideas quickly and accurately."
Gaskins was building a tool for what he called "content-originators". They wanted to communicate ideas; he wanted them to love PowerPoint. "You can see this motive called out in the very first description of PowerPoint that I ever wrote… almost three years before PowerPoint 1.0 shipped.
In the list of proposed 'user benefits', the culminating line is: 'Allows the content-originator to control the presentation.' The term 'content-originator' was the best I could devise to mean 'business people responsible for thinking up ideas and gaining assent to them'. A word like 'executive' or 'knowledge worker' sounded too much like a bureaucrat, and that didn't capture my idea of the people who would most intensely love PowerPoint. A bureaucrat churning out boilerplate doesn't care that much about the details of quality, but a thinker trying to gain assent to an original idea cares passionately about giving it the best shot possible, because the result makes a real difference to the presenter's personal and business success."
Gaskins also knew that making a creative product required something more than the typical group of Silicon Valley developers. "While never compromising on computer science knowledge and ability, I tried to find people who had broader interests, including social skills," he says. "We hired developers with undergraduate and graduate degrees in liberal arts or science disciplines as well as computer science, and with experience of many different kinds, both academic and commercial. "The people we were looking for were unusual. To find them, we tried to attract the smartest people, with a variety of backgrounds and with broader education and skills than most software startups. The difference in our people should be a big part of the reason for PowerPoint's success."
A huge body of evidence is emerging that demonstrates that the best way to improve the performance of a team is to increase the number of women in it. Maybe that too is part of the explanation for PowerPoint's success: "Out of the original 69 people on the complete PowerPoint roster (extending from me to the last person hired while I headed the group, eight years later), half (48 per cent) were women; 70 per cent of all women were in technical positions, and out of all our technical people, 43 per cent were women," Gaskins says. He estimates the average proportion of women in technical positions at the time was about ten per cent and today is around 20 per cent.
If the new "visual" world of computing was going to take off, and for the GUIs of products such as the Mac and Windows to seem worth buying, there would need to be a product that justified the extra cost. Word and Excel weren't going to be it - you could use them via MS-DOS. PowerPoint was that product.
A business could take the budget it would normally give a supplier to make slides, and spend it on PowerPoint and the computer and printer they needed to go with it. They bought PowerPoint and got the PC revolution thrown in for free. "For the first big breakthrough version of Windows (version 3.0, shipped mid-1990), Microsoft consciously focused on PowerPoint as the 'killer app' that would provide the incentive to buy a new Windows 3.0 machine," Gaskins says. "Bill Gates used pre-release versions of PowerPoint at large meetings of developers to show off what dazzling colour apps would be possible on Windows 3.0."
All of this added up to a new form of expression. Slideshows and overheads had existed in corporate life before, but they were so hard to produce that people didn't make them personal. PowerPoint turned it into something more like theatre. "I had studied drama for more than a decade, and I had read Erving Goffman's book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, in which Goffman applies "dramaturgical analysis" to social interaction, using "the extended metaphor of theatrical performance", Gaskins says. "So for many years I had been thinking about everyday social interaction in terms of theatre; and because my own jobs have depended on my making persuasive presentations, I'd thought about how to control them for best dramatic effect."
Twenty-nine years later, designer Stefanie Posavec concurs. Does designing for PowerPoint feel to her more like designing for screen or for print? She says neither: "It feels like it's a play. It is a really weird way of designing. This is a whole other way of communicating. It's a strange way of thinking about how to communicate a message. It's time-based. So much of it is based on this rhythm, the rhythm of the story. You have big reveals, and you have your jokes where you press the button. You have to figure out what your rhythm is and how you play the PowerPoint machine, like an accordion. Whether you're fast or slow will change the outcome of your presentation." From the accordion to the concertina: the long, strange PowerPoint journey.
Steve Jobs once said that the personal computer was like a "bicycle for the mind". PowerPoint was the first product to make that a reality for millions of us.
The modern world of business apps is very different to the one PowerPoint grew up in. The monolithic integrated suites are being nibbled to death by tiny applications networked via the internet, doing one thing very well and blurring the line between personal and productive in a way that PowerPoint pioneered.
That will happen to PowerPoint. If you want to collaborate on a presentation, then Google Slides is great. If you want to chuck words into an app and have them nicely styled, there are lots of HTML-based tools for that. There's Prezi for people who prefer a less linear narrative. Microsoft itself created Sway, designed to be better at some of the things PowerPoint gets co-opted for - book reports, websites, that kind of thing.
But the big, interesting challenge for PowerPoint is the changing technological environment. It was built for a world of PCs. We're now in a world of multiple devices, VR, multiple screens and presentations happening in multiple locations at the same time. To get a hint of what might happen to presentations in a context like this, WIRED visited a company called Oblong in Shoreditch, London.
John Underkoffler founded Oblong in 2006. He's known for being the designer behind the futuristic interfaces in the film Minority Report. With Oblong's flagship product - Mezzanine - he might have found the way to make some of those notions a reality. The first thing you notice in Oblong's demonstration suite is that you're looking at multiple displays, on more than one wall.
Mezzanine was conceived for a world where screens are cheap and ubiquitous. At the front of the room, where there would normally be one big monitor, there are three - all showing different things. You can put images alongside each other, and you can compare things on different screens. Oblong says its big clients love this. They can park a slide to one side of the presentation while they go on with the rest of the story. The content then always sits in the customer's mind. That seems simple, but it expands the possibilities of what a presentation can be.
Mezzanine also connects to the screens in your pocket. And lets you escape the confines of a single tool. Underkoffler's team are enthused about the democratising power of this non-linearity. They're trying to "design out" the power dynamics of PowerPoint. The modern meeting has to be about collaboration, so Oblong is trying to enable a "hive mind - more fluid, more interconnected"
WIRED asked everyone on this journey into the heart of PowerPoint what missing feature they'd add if they could. The best idea was from Katrina Sluis, curator at the photographer's Gallery, London: she suggested the addition of a shuffle button. That would make things a bit more non-linear, wouldn't it? Maybe that's all PowerPoint needs to prepare itself for the next 29 years.
Which is great. Except sometimes you want someone to actually give a presentation. Gaskins is fond of quoting the linguist and psychologist Steven Pinker talking to The New Yorker about PowerPoint. "Language is a linear medium: one damn word after another… When properly employed, PowerPoint makes the logical structure of an argument more transparent." That's what people seem to hate about PowerPoint, but it's also its superpower. It forces you to put your ideas in order - that might be a constraint but it's often a good one. PowerPoint invites you to focus, to look at your story and put it in a useful and persuasive order. That so many of us so often fail to do, that is our own fault.
Updated 10.08.17, 13:19: An image has been removed at the request of PA Consulting Group
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
