Happy birthday, PowerPoint!
Posted 27 June 2007 at 8:35AM by Simon Dickson in Doing business online
Few people have changed the world of business like Robert Gaskins. In April 1987, his software company Forethought launched a program to help Apple Mac users produce overhead transparencies or flip charts. A recent article in the Wall Street Journal describes how the program, originally called Presenter, failed to win over venture capitalists, who felt text-based DOS machines would never go away.
In July 1987, Forethought was bought out by Microsoft: at $14m, it was the company's first major acquisition. Reporting on the purchase, the New York Times noted:
Some industry officials think such ''desktop presentations'' have the potential to be as big a market as ''desktop publishing,'' which involves using computers to lay out newsletters and other publications.
So it's almost exactly 20 years since Microsoft PowerPoint saw the light of day. We've blogged here before about the backlash against 'PowerPoint culture': and interestingly, its father doesn't disagree. It was originally intended only for use by salespeople; instead, Robert accepts:
A lot of people in business have given up writing the documents. They just write the presentations, which are summaries without the detail, without the backup. A lot of people don't like the intellectual rigour of actually doing the work. (But) if they do an inadequate job with PowerPoint, they would do just as bad using something else.
But what of Harvard Graphics, which hit the market in 1986, a good few months before PowerPoint? It still exists, with a basic version available for download for around £35. But if you're looking for a PowerPoint alternative, look no further than the Impress component of OpenOffice.org - instantly familiar to PowerPoint users, packed with features, and free of charge too. At the very least, it offers a different set of default templates, so you'll look as if you made an effort.
Tags: harvard graphics, microsoft, OpenOffice.org, powerpoint, presentations, slideshows
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