Outlawing PowerPoint (Was: a suggestion....)

[Pete Resnick <presnick at qualcomm.com>]

On 12/12/98 at 8:41 AM -0500, Mike O'Dell wrote:

> as an aid to smaller meetings, I suggest outlawing powerpoint and viewgraphs.

In all deference to JK, I agree with this wholeheartedly. Inevitably 
the people with the PowerPoint presentations are also those who are 
either trying to teach novices or do marketing presentations during 
sessions, which is not what we are supposed to be doing at these 
things. I became disgusted and walked out of NTPSEC when I had to sit 
through a talk on how time service works. This was justified with, 
"This might be review for some of you, but I think it's worth going 
over for the new people." It's not worth going over; if you don't 
understand the protocol being discussed, you don't belong in the room.

I am also somewhat offended by silly borders and corporate logos on 
these presentations. We spend time to come to these meetings to 
discuss protocols, not to see how artistic you are or that your 
company supports any particular work. This is engineering, not 
marketing.

I do like Scott McNealy's take on this: "We had 12.9 gigabytes of 
PowerPoint slides on our network. And I thought, 'What a huge waste 
of corporate productivity.' So we banned it. And we've had three 
unbelievable record-breaking fiscal quarters since we banned 
PowerPoint. Now, I would argue that every company in the world, if it 
would just ban PowerPoint, would see their earnings skyrocket. 
Employees would stand around going, 'What do I do? Guess I've got to 
go to work.'"

pr
--
Pete Resnick <mailto:presnick at qualcomm.com>
QUALCOMM Incorporated
Work: (217)337-6377 or (619)651-4478
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