Yesterday as a reward, my employer took the whole team out for a lunch cruise on the lake. Unfortunately the weather forecast was calling for “chance of thunderstorms” and I was sure we were all going to be lost at sea. Fortunately the weather turned out better than that, and a good time was had by all, except for the boring PowerPoint presentation. Can’t managers even say “We’ve done well this year, thanks” without making a 45 minute long PowerPoint presentation showing every bullet point accomplishment we’ve done? And let’s not forget that this is PowerPoint, not boring “old media”, so of course every bullet point has to come skidding in from one side of the screen or the other. Sigh.
I saw Vint Cerf give a talk on the future of the Internet and when he was hooking up his laptop to the projector he said “Power corrupts, PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.”