What is the history of PPT software?

PowerPoint, one of the most brilliant, influential and complaining softwares in the history of computer development, is 20 years old this year. It's hard to say how many birthday celebrations PowerPoint will have; Almost as many people dig this software as are willing to use it.

PowerPoint makes countless wonderful demonstrations icing on the cake, and also makes countless stupid ideas put on a gorgeous coat with pictures and texts. Not only in the conference room, but also in the sixth grade book report.

With all this happening, the content of cultural defects that may be called PowerPoint has brought as much confusion, anxiety and even shock to its two creators as others.

RobertGaskins is a visionary entrepreneur. As early as the mid-1980s, he realized that the huge but undeveloped market of commercial slides had formed a perfect combination with the emerging graphic computer era. Many venture capitalists do not agree with this. They insist that DOS computers in text format will never disappear.

1984, Gaskins joined a declining Silicon Valley software company called Foresight and hired software developer Dennis Austin. Bob and Dennis perfected his dream and designed a "demonstrator" to carry out the plan. Dennis and Tom Luther King designed the original version of this program. Bob later suggested a new product name "PowerPoint", which eventually became the official name of the product (Gaskins's PPT product planning).

PowerPoint 1.0 for Mac operating system is listed in 1987. Later that year, Microsoft acquired the company for $65,438+$400,000 (the first acquisition in Microsoft history). Three years later, the Windows version of PowerPoint came out. Gaskins, 63, and Austin, 60, talked about the birth and wide application of PowerPoint in an interview last week. They are deeply proud of their technical and strategic success. But what's more worth mentioning is that they didn't defend all kinds of criticisms about PowerPoint at all. In fact, the best single source of comments (whether praise or criticism) on PowerPoint is Gaskins's home page (with a lot of Dilbert cartoons on it).

Perhaps the harshest criticism comes from EdwardTufte, a graphic master at Yale University. He said that this software promoted the form to the content, exposing the attitude of businessmen who turned everything into sales promotion. He even said that PowerPoint was also responsible for the space shuttle Columbia crash in 2003, because some crucial technical problems were hidden under optimistic slides.

Gaskins didn't argue about it. He said that everything Taft said was absolutely correct. People often use PowerPoint wrongly.

Gaskins reminded those who questioned him that PowerPoint presentation should never be the whole content of a proposal or scheme, but just a simple summary of mature and long content. He took the original business plan of this software as an example: this repeatedly discussed business plan has 53 pages, and the supporting slides only list the key contents, only a dozen * * *.

He complained that since PowerPoint appeared, many business people stopped writing documents. They are just writing a presentation, but there are no details and supporting outlines. Many people don't like the mental work of writing detailed documents.

Gaskins and Austin said that one of the problems is that PowerPoint has been bundled with Office, which makes the number of people exposed to the software greatly exceed the original target group-salespeople. As projectors become smaller and cheaper, almost every room is ready to play PowerPoint.

Now, the children in the school have begun to write book reports with PowerPoint. Gaskins and Austin hate it. They insist that children need to think and write in complete paragraphs.

However, Gaskins and Austin are not in favor of imposing some unwarranted charges on PowerPoint. Gaskins studied a large collection of presentations before designing this software. He said that this dot format existed long before PowerPoint came out.

Although these two people must know how to use PowerPoint, they both think they are not experts. They don't even know many new advanced features. They also resent that some people spend hours adjusting font size and font size under the guise of doing practical things. They are often willing to tell a joke that the best way to paralyze the opposition camp is to put PowerPoint on the stage to interfere with their decision-making. Some analysts say this happened at the Pentagon.

Both of them left Microsoft in the 1990s and are now working on their own projects. Austin didn't miss the day of Apple's developer conference last week, hoping to keep up with young people's thinking. Although both of them agree that it may be feasible to develop a software similar to PowerPoint to build a high-end website, they don't want to put this idea into practice.

Gaskins and Austin are unwilling to express themselves, so they have no complaints about the popularity of PowerPoint. Whenever they tell strangers what they have done, they often hear that people can't live without this software and so on.

If there is one thing that makes them sad, it is that complaints about PowerPoint are usually not about the software itself, but about poor presentations. Austin said that this is just like print media, and all kinds of rubbish may be printed on it.

As Gaskins said: If they don't do well in PowerPoint, they will make the same mistakes in other tools.