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It's All PowerPoint's Fault (12/15/03)
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Speaking of PowerPoint (yes, we were-- honest!), despite the fact that there's certainly no shortage of actual on-topic stuff that would fit nicely into AtAT's plot right now, sometimes the siren song of Microsoft-bashing fodder is far too strong to resist. Okay, usually it's too strong to resist. And when it is resistible, we wind up resisting our resistance and taking the easy bash anyway. What can we say? It's one of our subtle charms.
So away we go! Faithful viewer Ribalrous Cabaret tipped us off to the fact that the New York Times actually went with this for an article headline: PowerPoint Makes You Dumb. Pretty much says it all right there, doesn't it? Except that the evidence backing that assertion is quite grim: it seems that when NASA's Columbia Accident Investigation Board issued its report on why things went south, in addition to problems with the shuttle's insulation, the committee also blamed PowerPoint. Had NASA engineers presented their assessment of possible wing damage in the form of "traditional ink-and-paper technical reports" instead of a PowerPoint slide "so crammed with nested bullet points and irregular short forms that it was nearly impossible to untangle," someone in charge might have actually realized that things were serious.
Now, far be it from us to do something as rash as blaming PowerPoint for the Columbia crash (that's NASA's job, apparently), but it seems that NASA's not alone in accusing Microsoft's slideshow software of encouraging poor presentation of important info. Information presentation theorist Edward Tufte recently blasted PowerPoint because its low resolution limits slides to about 40 words each and charts to a mere 12 elements, and thus "forces people to mutilate data beyond comprehension" by relying on crappy bullet lists and letting PowerPoint appear to take up the slack by wrapping it all in "an attitude of commercialism that turns everything into a sales pitch." Yeah! Go get 'em, Eddie baby! Give 'em two fists of what-for!
"But AtAT," you ask, "doesn't everything that this guy is saying about PowerPoint apply equally to Keynote?" What are you, nuts? Keep that kind of talk to yourself before people think you're a commie. Or worse, a Microsoft sympathizer. Geez. Kids today...
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SceneLink (4393)
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 | | The above scene was taken from the 12/15/03 episode: December 15, 2003: We were off a bit; Apple has actually sold 25 million songs through the iTunes Music Store. Meanwhile, Apple applies for the trademark "iWrite," and NASA says part of the blame for the crash of the space shuttle Columbia belongs to PowerPoint...
Other scenes from that episode: 4391: 20 Mil, 25 Mil, Whatever (12/15/03) Hold the phone, there, Beryl-- remember that iTunes Music Store sales update last week? Sure you do; that was the one where people were reporting that the tally stood at 20 million songs sold as of a week ago, December 8th... 4392: Could Be A Spreadsheet (12/15/03) Say, has anyone noticed that AppleWorks hasn't been updated in any serious way since there were two popes running around? Maybe that's because Apple's working on something else. You may have heard rumors that Apple has been slapping together an "AppleWorks Pro" suite that'll be beefier and better-suited for business use, and certainly there are no end of clues that such a thing is in the cards; AppleWorks has its own anemic presentation mode, for example, and yet Apple now sells a serious PowerPoint competitor in Keynote which could well be destined for a suite...
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