I (Heart) Powerpoint

Working within the marketing group of a large corporation, I come across Powerpoint presentations all the time, sometimes two to three times daily. Internal presentations to management. External presentations to potential partners or clients. Anything that requires focused communication or more aptly put, "a quick and dirty". Why should senior managers have to waste precious time reading a long-winded tome when a simple one page bulleted summary will suffice? Or so the conventional thinking goes. Regardless, in the span of a mere decade, Powerpoint has become the ubiquitous tool of modern business and is now the primary method of formal management communications taught in every MBA program worldwide. My project groups in the MBA program rely on it almost exclusively for our presentations. But Powerpoint has also been the target of considerable criticism for the very reasons that contributed to its success, namely its simplicity. Critics like Edward Tufte at Yale have blasted its emphasis on form over substance (see Powerpoint is Evil, link here). But recently, an unlikely person has come to Powerpoint's defense. David Byrne, former lead singer of the Talking Heads, has been crowing about the use of Powerpoint as a medium of art. Apparently, he made his "pitch" a couple of days ago to an audience on the Berkeley campus (link here). Lecture, performance art, and tongue-in-cheek commentary all rolled up into one gloriously strange and hilarious hourlong presentation. According to the article, the original two creators of Powerpoint, both Cal graduates apparently, were in the audience, laughing along with the others.