{"id":41383,"date":"2003-12-22T22:52:00","date_gmt":"2003-12-22T22:52:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/2003\/12\/22\/the-cult-of-powerpoint\/"},"modified":"2003-12-22T22:52:00","modified_gmt":"2003-12-22T22:52:00","slug":"the-cult-of-powerpoint","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20031222-00\/?p=41383","title":{"rendered":"The cult of PowerPoint"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Recent articles on <a href=\"http:\/\/www.slashnot.com\/article.php3?story_id=338\">how PowerPoint contributed to failure at NASA<\/a> reminded me that this is hardly a new discovery. The Department of Defense long ago discovered that <a href=\"http:\/\/zdnet.com.com\/2100-11-502314.html\">PowerPoint is a great way to hide the fact that you don&#8217;t know what you&#8217;re talking about<\/a>.\nI remember reading an article (which I of course can&#8217;t find now) of a &#8220;cult of PowerPoint&#8221;. Apparently some organizations take the built-in PowerPoint template as gospel. Every presentation <b>must<\/b> follow the structure established by the PowerPoint template. The first slide is always a title; the second is always a statement of a problem; the third slide is always summary of previous work, etc.\nUm, people, it&#8217;s just a template.<\/p>\n<p>And before the Linux folks get all so gloaty: &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/wp-dyn\/articles\/A18516-2001Oct18.html\">Ravens Coach Brian Billick faults last week&#8217;s [October 2001] defensive breakdown on team&#8217;s switch to Linux operating system<\/a>.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Recent articles on how PowerPoint contributed to failure at NASA reminded me that this is hardly a new discovery. The Department of Defense long ago discovered that PowerPoint is a great way to hide the fact that you don&#8217;t know what you&#8217;re talking about. I remember reading an article (which I of course can&#8217;t find [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[26],"class_list":["post-41383","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-other"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"<p>Recent articles on how PowerPoint contributed to failure at NASA reminded me that this is hardly a new discovery. The Department of Defense long ago discovered that PowerPoint is a great way to hide the fact that you don&#8217;t know what you&#8217;re talking about. I remember reading an article (which I of course can&#8217;t find [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41383","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41383"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41383\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41383"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41383"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41383"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}