Don't let Marketing mess with your slides

It’s PDC season, so I thought I’d relate an anecdote about a conference from many years ago.

I forget which conference it was, maybe GCDC 1996, we were all busy preparing our presentations and submitted them to the Microsoft conference representatives so they could apply the standard template, clean them up, print out copies to go into the handouts, all that stuff.

What about that “clean them up” step?

We didn’t realize what “clean them up” meant until we showed up at the conference and looked at the handouts.

Part of “cleaning up” was inserting “®” and “™” symbols as necessary. Which meant that they also took every occurrence of the abbreviation “VB” and changed it to “Microsoft Visual Basic®”. They even did this to the presentation on vertex buffers. The abbreviation for vertex buffers is also “VB”.

You can imagine what this did to the presentation on vertex buffers.