Don't Blame the Program

(Dear readers: I am back after a brief break.)

In 1987, Forethought, a prophetically named software company in Silicon Valley, developed the visual presentation program PowerPoint for the Macintosh Operation System. Within a few months the new program was purchased by Microsoft as its first major acquisition.

Microsoft soon expanded the program to work with Windows systems as well as Macs, and then bundled it into the Microsoft Office suite that would essentially take over the world of business software. Since the late 1990s, PowerPoint's market share of the presentation market has consistently been estimated at about 95 percent.

I'm sure many people love it, and apologies to them, but from the first I have absolutely hated PowerPoint presentations, finding them at best confusing and often downright unintelligible. What must make sense to many other people makes no sense at all to me.

The logic that lies behind PowerPoint presentations reflects the code that the brains of most people in business easily comprehend. It must play for them like music, though perhaps that would be the genre of modern jazz that sounds like a traffic jam.

My distaste for the software peaked while working in middle management at one leading technology company where the entire communication culture -- the entire corporate purpose -- seemed to hinge on PowerPoint presentations . The large unit I managed worked for weeks on a presentation explaining what exactly it was that we were supposed to be doing and why.

Once my team determined it was ready, we forwarded our presentation to upper management, where it was discussed at length before being sent back to us for revisions. We would then produce a new round of PowerPoints with adjustments here and adjustments there before sending the revised deck back upstairs.

This went on for many months. The ultimate goal, apparently, was for our PowerPoint to be presented to the board of directors, a body composed entirely of men who lived far from where our company was headquartered and who reigned like distant gods over the entire enterprise.

Gradually, it occurred to me we were caught in our own Groundhog Day, because we were never going to get board approval for our presentation. And in our case there would be no happy ending. I realized the reason nobody could ever agree on the PowerPoint presentation was that we actually had no clear idea why our company even existed.

We were spending millions of dollars going nowhere.

The enterprise been two separate tech companies before being mushed together by some of the leading venture capitalists, who’d made off like thieves. Those of us who worked there, though generously compensated, quite simply would never be able to create a viable presentation of the un-presentable.

Inevitably the company spiraled into bankruptcy, which then became front-page news in the Wall Street Journal.

POSTSCRIPT: Years after the company I described above went bankrupt and disappeared from the NYSE, I visited Japan only to discover that a Japanese subsidiary of the firm was still very much in operation. They used the same logo we had popularized before our demise and probably were still searching for their identity.

Maybe they never got our final PowerPoint. The one that said "Sayōnara."