Open main menu
Home
Random
Recent changes
Special pages
Community portal
Preferences
About Wikipedia
Disclaimers
Incubator escapee wiki
Search
User menu
Talk
Dark mode
Contributions
Create account
Log in
Editing
Microsoft PowerPoint
(section)
Warning:
You are not logged in. Your IP address will be publicly visible if you make any edits. If you
log in
or
create an account
, your edits will be attributed to your username, along with other benefits.
Anti-spam check. Do
not
fill this in!
===Business uses=== PowerPoint was originally targeted just for business presentations. Robert Gaskins, who was responsible for its design, has written about his intended customers: "... I did not target other existing large groups of users of presentations, such as school teachers or military officers. ... I also did not plan to target people who were not existing users of presentations ... such as clergy and school children ... . Our focus was purely on business users, in small and large companies, from one person to the largest multinationals."<ref name="Gaskins-Sweating-Bullets-2012-cultural">{{Cite book |last=Gaskins |first=Robert |author-link=Robert Gaskins |title=Sweating Bullets: Notes about Inventing PowerPoint |year=2012 |publisher=Vinland Books |isbn=978-0-9851424-0-7 <!-- hardcover ed -->|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=RC_5OCQQJ7YC |access-date=September 5, 2017 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170624031005/http://www.robertgaskins.com/powerpoint-history/sweating-bullets/gaskins-sweating-bullets-webpdf-isbn-9780985142414.pdf <!-- webpdf ed --> |url-status=live |archive-date=June 24, 2017}}</ref>{{Rp|pages=76β77}} Business people had for a long time made presentations for sales calls and for internal company communications, and PowerPoint produced the same formats in the same style and for the same purposes.<ref name="Gaskins-Sweating-Bullets-2012-cultural" />{{Rp|page=420}} PowerPoint use in business grew over its first five years (1987β1992) to sales of about 1 million copies annually, for worldwide market share of 63 percent.<ref name="Sweating-Bullets-2012-salesnums" /> Over the following five years (1992β1997) PowerPoint sales accelerated, to a rate of about 4 million copies annually, for worldwide market share of 85 percent.<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Ziff Davis Market Intelligence |date=September 1998 |title=The 800-Pound Gorilla of the Presentation Market |journal=Mobile Computing and Communications |page=95 |volume=9 |issue=9 |issn=1047-1952 |quote=... in 1997, without question the market leader was Microsoft Corp.'s PowerPoint, which sold more than 4 million copies and controls 85 percent of the market. |url=https://filetea.me/t1sEVBHlotISPCAVUKpeg2F5A |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://www.webcitation.org/6bxj2eryp?url=https://filetea.me/t1sEVBHlotISPCAVUKpeg2F5A |archive-date=October 1, 2015 |access-date=September 29, 2017 |df=mdy-all }} {{webarchive|format=addlarchives|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170826204750/https://filetea.me/n3wiYbSzCLuStyw3hl7fDW0dA |date=August 26, 2017}}</ref> The increase in business use has been attributed to "[[network effect]]s", whereby additional users of PowerPoint in a company or an industry increased its salience and value to other users.<ref>{{Cite interview |last=Gaskins |first=Robert |subject-link=Robert Gaskins |interviewer=Clay Chandler |title=The Man Who Invented PowerPoint |publisher=[[Hult International Business School]] |journal=Bento |number=7 |url=http://bento.hult.edu/the-man-who-dreamed-of-powerpoint/ <!-- URL is correctly different from title --> |date=October 2016 |access-date=September 22, 2017 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170922214245/http://bento.hult.edu/the-man-who-dreamed-of-powerpoint/ |url-status=live |archive-date=September 22, 2017 |quote=PowerPoint succeeded so quickly because it spread rapidly by viral transmission from user to user ... every time early adopters used our product effectively, they demonstrated its value to other potential customers. PowerPoint made it especially easy for colleagues within the same company to share materials and incorporate one another's slides into their presentations with automatic formatting. This created networks of cooperation that benefited everyone.}}</ref> Not everyone immediately approved of the greater use of PowerPoint for presentations, even in business. CEOs who very early were reported to discourage or ban PowerPoint presentations at internal business meetings included [[Louis V. Gerstner Jr.|Lou Gerstner]] (at IBM, in 1993),<ref>{{cite book |last=Gerstner | first=Louis V. Jr. |author-link=Louis V. Gerstner Jr. |date=2002 |title=Who Says Elephants Can't Dance? Inside IBM's Historic Turnaround |publisher=HarperCollins |page=[https://archive.org/details/whosayselephants00gers/page/43 43] |isbn=978-0060523794 |quote=[Gerstner:] By that afternoon an email about my hitting the Off button on the overhead projector was crisscrossing the world. Talk about consternation! It was as if the President of the United States had banned the use of English at White House meetings. |url=https://archive.org/details/whosayselephants00gers/page/43 }}</ref> [[Scott McNealy]] (at Sun Microsystems, in 1996),<ref>{{cite news |editor-last=Rae-Dupree |editor-first=Janet |date=January 27, 1997 |title=Sun Microsystems' Chief: A Mission Against 'Dark Side' (Q & A With Scott McNealy) |newspaper=San Jose Mercury News |issn=0747-2099 |department=Business Monday |edition=Morning Final |page=8E |url=http://www.mercurynews.com/archive-search/ |url-access=subscription <!-- but archive is ungated --> |archive-url=https://archive.today/20170923220156/https://filetea.me/n3wHzDE7FZKSFqqS6e5Vl8ICw |archive-date=September 23, 2017 |url-status=live |access-date=September 23, 2017 |quote=[McNealy:] ' ... we've had three unbelievable record-breaking fiscal quarters since we banned PowerPoint. Now, I would argue that every company in the world, if they would just ban PowerPoint, would see their earnings skyrocket. Employees would stand around going, "What do I do? Guess I've got to go to work.{{Double single}} |df=mdy-all }} {{webarchive|format=addlarchives|url=https://archive.today/20170923220156/https://filetea.me/n3wHzDE7FZKSFqqS6e5Vl8ICw |date=September 23, 2017}}</ref> and [[Steve Jobs]] (at Apple, in 1997).<ref>{{cite book |last=Isaacson |first=Walter |author-link=Walter Isaacson |date=2011 |title=Steve Jobs |publisher=Simon and Schuster |page=[https://archive.org/details/stevejobs00isaa/page/337 337] |isbn=978-1-4516-4853-9 |quote=[Jobs:] 'People would confront a problem by creating a presentation. I wanted them to engage, to hash things out at the table, rather than show a bunch of slides. People who know what they're talking about don't need PowerPoint.' |url-access=registration |url=https://archive.org/details/stevejobs00isaa/page/337 }}</ref> But even so, Rich Gold, a scholar who studied corporate presentation use at [[PARC (company)|Xerox PARC]], could write in 1999: "Within today's corporation, if you want to communicate an idea ... you use PowerPoint."<ref>{{Cite book |chapter-url=https://faculty.washington.edu/farkas/TC510-Fall2011/GoldReadingPowerpoint.pdf |last=Gold |first=Rich |orig-year=Syposium paper 1999 |chapter=Chapter 14: Reading PowerPoint |pages=256β270 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170923165414/https://faculty.washington.edu/farkas/TC510-Fall2011/GoldReadingPowerpoint.pdf |url-status=live |archive-date=September 23, 2017 |access-date=September 23, 2017 |editor-last=Allen |editor-first=Nancy |title=Working with Words and Images: New Steps in an Old Dance |location=Westport, Conn. |publisher=Ablex Publishing |isbn=978-1-56750-608-2 |date=2002 |series=New Directions in Computers and Composition Studies}}</ref>
Edit summary
(Briefly describe your changes)
By publishing changes, you agree to the
Terms of Use
, and you irrevocably agree to release your contribution under the
CC BY-SA 4.0 License
and the
GFDL
. You agree that a hyperlink or URL is sufficient attribution under the Creative Commons license.
Cancel
Editing help
(opens in new window)