Interesting story from New York Times on the usage of PowerPoint in the US military. The title says – We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint.
Here are are a couple of interesting quotes from the article.
“PowerPoint’s worst offense [is a] rigid list of bullet points (in, say, a presentation on a conflict’s causes) that take no account of interconnected political, economic and ethnic forces. If you divorce war from all of that, it becomes a targeting exercise.”
“It’s dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control. Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable.”
To be fair, this is not a criticism of Microsoft or the PowerPoint software in the Office suite. The article criticizes the notion of all slideshow software including Keynote.