post

Microsoft Should Donate PowerPoint to the Taliban

Posted on April 28, 2010 ·

I don’t pretend to be a military strategist, but I’ve figured out how to win the war in Afghanistan.  OK, not on my own – The New York Times helped, with an article titled: We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint:

Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the leader of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, was shown a PowerPoint slide in Kabul last summer that was meant to portray the complexity of American military strategy, but looked more like a bowl of spaghetti.

“When we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war,” General McChrystal dryly remarked, one of his advisers recalled, as the room erupted in laughter.

Another choice quote:

“It’s dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control,” General McMaster said in a telephone interview afterward. “Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable.”

Wait, since when do Army Generals not like bullets? 🙂   But there’s more:

Last year when a military Web site, Company Command, asked an Army platoon leader in Iraq, Lt. Sam Nuxoll, how he spent most of his time, he responded, “Making PowerPoint slides.” When pressed, he said he was serious.

Platoon commanders spending most of their time fiddling with Powerpoint?  And we wonder why …. (slapped my hand, scrapped the rest of my comment…)

So here’s my 3-step Military Strategy, bulletized (could fit one PPT slide!):

  • Ban PowerPoint from the US Military
  • Convince Microsoft to donate 10,000 copies of PowerPoint to the Taliban
  • Go get them while they are busy PPT-ing 🙂

(Note: the above does not constitute a pro-war stance- I’m just having fun…)

Update: an old post of mine comes to mind:Romulan Attack Because of Microsoft Office

(Cross-posted @ CloudAve)

Filed Under: Humor · Tagged: , , , , , , , , , ,
post

Mark Suster on Fox News: How to Present Your Business to a Crowd

Posted on February 26, 2010 ·

My favorite quote: One of the worst things with Powerpoint is the bulletpoint…

(Cross-posted @ CloudAve )

Filed Under: Marketing / PR · Tagged: , , , , , ,
post

Oh, That Bloated Presentation – The Web is Greener

Posted on September 17, 2008 ·

We can argue all we want about  the benefits of SaaS, discuss hypothetical use cases at length, but the best showcases are served up by real life, often unexpectedly.

A startup CEO friend asked me to take a look at his PowerPoint deck before he would send it to a VC.  (Incidentally, I don’t believe presentations should be sent in advance of a meeting:  if your deck has enough content to convey the message standalone, than it’s not a  presentation… but let’s put that aside for now.)   I agreed to help, and he fired off an email with the PPT attachment.

Too bad I could not open it.  I have MS Office 2003 on my Windows computer – that’s the last version I purchased, since moving to the Cloud, and I won’t buy an Office package ever again – and he has Office 2008 on his shiny Macbook Air.  (Standard issue for hot startup CEO’s in San Francisco?). Yes, I know there’s a converter thingie I can download from MS, but apparently I haven’t done it on this particular computer, so my friend quickly saved it for me in the older format.

I reviewed and commented on it, and as an aside noted that the fonts and the text alignment were way off on a page.  He did not see the text problem on the version I sent back.  Then came a second round of conversions and emails.  It became apparent that no matter what we do we always end up seeing different layouts – so much for the MS to MS conversion – so we just focused on content, and I sent back the revised version.  It took a while… hm, no wonder, the PPT deck that started it’s life as a 2MB file first became 5, then 7, finally 9 Megabytes.  Wow!

What an inefficient process!  Emailing multiple bloated copies of the same file, never seeing the identical version, leaving quite some footprint behind, when we could have started with an online presentation, collaboratively work on the one and only copy online, see the same and not clutter several computers with the garbage files.

I will come back to this in a minute, but here’s another benefit my CEO friend missed out on: providing the latest and greatest information.  The VC Partner he was talking to was about to to go on vacation, and she was planning to review the presentation in the next 2 weeks – who knows when.  This startup was at the time in advanced discussion with major prospects, and signing any of those deals would materially change the presentation.  Had my friend sent just a URL to the online presentation, he could have safely update it any time, and be assured that whenever the VC reviews it, she will always have the latest and greatest information.  Does this scenario ( sans the VC) sound familiar?  How many times have you hit “send” only to wish you could retract the email and replace the attachment with the correct version?  

Back to the storage footprint issue. On my count, just between my friend and myself, we generated and stored nine copies of this presentation, the last one being 9MB, up from 2.  It’s probably fair to assume a similar rate of multiplication in the process the original deck was created, between the CEO and his team.  Next he sends it to the VC, who will likely share it with several Associates in the firm, and in case there’s more interest, with other partners.  Of course my friend will send the same presentation to a few other VC firms as well, so it’s not beyond reasonable to think that there are at least a hundred copies floating around, occupying a Gigabyte of storage or more.  Oh, and I did not even consider the footprint of this presentation at ISP’s and all hops it goes through.  Not that I ever bought into IDC’s Storage Paradox, but this is clearly a very wasteful process.

All of that could be replaced with one central copy on the Web, represented by a URL. 

Oh, and the irony of all this: my friend is CEO of a GreenTech startup. smile_wink

(Cross-posted from CloudAve.  Follow our CloudAve Feed for more)

Filed Under: Collaboration, SaaS · Tagged: , , , , , , , , ,
post

Zoho Show: Another Step Towards Better Group Collaboration

Posted on June 25, 2008 ·

I don’t normally write about incremental product updates, even if they come from one of my Clients – like in this case Zoho.  But today’s Zoho Show update touches a pet peeve of mine, group collaboration, specifically the lack of portable group definitions available for many online services.

For example the Enterprise Irregulars group has intense discussion threads using Google Groups, which I often praised for stepping out of being just a group email mechanism, becoming a mini community/collaborative platform.  But it’s a closed system, the definition of a “group”, i.e. it’s members does not exist outside the Groups application, we can’t just simply share a Google Doc,  Spreadsheet, or Calendar with the predefined EI group. Note: I am not complaining about Google specifically ,  most services are like this, basically allowing three levels of collaboration/sharing:

  • none (private)
  • shared with a list of users
  • public

Zoho started to address better Group management about half a year ago, in February, enabling Writer, Sheet and Mail to recognize a Group created in their My Account area.  Today Zoho Show joins the list: you can share your presentations with contacts pulled from Zoho Mail, save them to groups, or use groups defined elsewhere (Mail, Accounts) in Zoho.  Eventually there will be multiple privacy / sharing levels within the Zoho Universe:

  • private
  • shared with individual email id’s
  • shared with Groups (defined once, recognized in all applications)
  • shared by Domain (i.e. share info within your business)

Other than group collaboration, today’s update brings export capability to PowerPoint and other formats, expanded language support, easy embedding of Picasa images (Flickr support has been available for a while) and more.  For a full list of the enhancements see the Zoho Blog.

Related articles
Zemanta Pixie
Filed Under: Collaboration, Personal Productivity, SaaS · Tagged: , , , , , ,
post

Hate PowerPoint Because You Love Your Audience

Posted on April 9, 2008 ·

Ok, I admit: it’s a bombastic title. Even worse, it’s stolen. I stole it from Entrepreneur – Startup CEO – Investor – Blogger Dharmesh Shah, who just explained why he hates Powerpoint, and we should, too. He points to Jeff Nolan’s post titled PowerPoint And The Spoken Word, which in turn links to Presentation Diva Laura “Pistachio” Fitton’s humorous piece, I don’t want them to be bored.

Client: “Should I have a PowerPoint?”

Pistachio: “Why?”

Client: “I don’t want them to be bored.”

Pistachio: “Then don’t.”

Pistachio: “Is there anything you need to tell them that you cannot do with your body or your voice?”

Client: “No.”

Pistachio: “There you go.”

Pistachio: “Uh, do you mind if I write this down for a blog post?”

The only reason the Presentation meme is not featured on TechMeme yet is that a good part of it is behind firewall, born at the SAP Marketing Community Virtual Meeting. So now I’m playing manual TechMeme, aggregating the conversation together here.

It all started by Laura giving practical advice on 10 Minutes to a Presentation that Rocks MUCH More. My favorite of her tips:

Lightning Round
Race through your presentation using no more than one sentence to explain each slide. Take no more than five seconds per slide. State the point in just one short remark. If you can’t, kill the slide. If you
can’t kill it, “maim” it until it has a point.

Then in Your Role-O-Deck (hm, I think I’ve just discovered another of her tricks, i.e. use killer titles) she speaks out against using “the deck”, a thick set of slides that are not used as visual aids by a live speaker, but as bastardized and poor replacement for MS Word, to write actual reports in SAP – in fact any large corporation.

My comment to her post is that the “ppt deck” is not only a corporate disease:

I’m involved with the startup community here, where the mentality is fresh thinking, “challenge all”, yet VC’s repeatedly ask startup Founders to send their “deck”. Deck is a nasty word, but describes what these bastardized “presentations” have become: thick and heavy.
My simple rule: if your deck is good enough to send in advance, i.e. it has enough content to convey the message, than you don’t have a presentation. Send the document, but develop another one you can use as visual aid to an actual live presentation.

Faheem Ahmed, VP of Portfolio Positioning and Messaging at SAP agrees in The myth of the “standalone” presentation:

Not all slides are presented. And there’s nothing wrong with using PPT to create useful diagrams or reports … it’s a tool just like any other. But then we shouldn’t call this set of slides a “presentation” any more. It’s a document.

He also talks against recycling presentations again and again, instead advises to define the strategic intent and develop specific ones.

So coming back to Dharmesh, does he really hate Powerpoint? No he doesn’t – not as a tool. He just hates “the deck”, and presentations that take over from the person who should be what we focus on. To illustrate his point, he shows us two examples, Mac vs. PC style:

Steve Jobs apparently wants the audience to listen to him tell the story, rather than read the slides:

Next comes a slide from Michael Dell. These are meant to be sent to someone who needs to get the full story looking at them, but when they are use as illustration to a live story, they become a distraction:

Dharmesh concludes:

If I had the talent and resources of Steve Jobs, I’d be able to create slides just fine. But I don’t (have the talent) and don’t have the resources) so I don’t like to create slides.

Hate PowerPoint because you love your audience.

I’m going to finish this with a quote from Jeff Nolan (hey, kids are always winners):

Powerpoint is like my 4 year old’s blanket, he can’t have his apple juice or go to sleep without it. Executives are afraid to not have Powerpoint, the big difference is that my 4 year old will eventually give up his blanket.

smile_wink

Filed Under: Marketing / PR, Personal Productivity · Tagged: , , ,
post

Not All Presentation Managers Are Created Equal…

Posted on January 25, 2008 ·

Sorry if this post feels a bit tongue-in-cheek. It is.  But I can’t help making the comparison when I see both Google and Zoho announcing new features of their Presentation Managers the same day.

We can’t stop adding features!  – announces the Google Docs Blog.  Today’s newbies are PDF support and adding vector shapes.  Some shapes.. the pic to the left shows the available inventory.

The pic below lists the shapes available in Zoho Show:

 

Add to the above hundreds of clipart items in Zoho Show, all of which, as well as the shapes can not only be moved and resized, like those in Google, but also flipped, rotated directly by dragging them.  And of course there’s Zoho’s theme gallery to jumpstart your presentation with… and a zillion more features.

Oh, well… draw your own conclusion.  Bias alert:smile_embaressed  I am an advisor to Zoho.  Don’t just take my word – go and play with Show yourself.

Related posts: Download Squad, Googlified , Google Operating System, Google Blogoscoped

Filed Under: Collaboration, Personal Productivity, SaaS · Tagged: , , , , , , ,
post

Microsoft Decides You Don’t Need Your Old Data

Posted on January 3, 2008 ·

Do you think old, archive data on your computers is safe? Think again. Or just re-define safe: so safe that you can’t access it yourself.

In it’s infinite wisdom Microsoft decided certain old documents, including those created by their own Word, Excel and PowerPoint may pose a security risk, so they decided to block them in Service Pack 3 to Microsoft Office 2003. SP3 came out in December September (thanks for the correction) so you may or may not have it yet. Here’s the “fun” part:

  • There is no clear definition of what’s blocked: the easy one is PowerPoint, where anything before 97 is dead, but as for Word or Excel (let alone other, previously compatible programs), you have to rely on this cryptic description by MS.
  • There is no warning whatsoever at the time of installing SP3
  • Even if you know what’s coming, there’s no way to easily locate and convert what is about to become inaccessible on your computer. Disaster may hit months or years away, when you need to access an archive file, but can’t.

Now, before you shrug it off, remember, this isn’t simply abandoning users still running pre-historic versions of software; we’re talking about data files here. You may run the latest release of all applications and still have no reason to touch old documents. After all, that’s what an archive is all about – you *know* your documents are there and will be accessible, should the need arise at any time in the future.

Back in the 80’s and 90’s paperless office was a popular phrase but remained largely a dream, since a lot of information still originated in paper form. The balance has largely shifted since then: the few things I still receive in paper format either end in the waste-basket, or I quickly scan them trusting that with cheap storage and powerful search I will always be able to pull up anything I need. I am finally living in a largely paperless world. But Microsoft just violated that trust, the very foundation of going paperless. Of course I shouldn’t be entirely surprised, this coming from the company which previously decided that the safest PC is a dead PC.

Solution? Microsoft offers one, in this article: tinker with your Registry, an admittedly dangerous, and definitely not user-friendly operation. I prefer Wired’s alternative:

Naturally, there’s an alternative which is somewhat easier (and free): just grab a copy of OpenOffice which can handle the older file formats. Once you’ve got them open, now might be a good time to convert them to ODF documents lest Office 2017 decide to again disable support for older file formats.

And of course I wouldn’t be mesmile_wink if I didn’t point out that this, and many other headaches simply disappear when you ditch the desktop and move online. Web applications typically don’t have major new versions, they just get continually updated (e.g. Zoho updates all their applications every few weeks). When that’s not the case, like when Zoho Show 2.0 was released recently and it required updating the user documents, the service provider takes care of it. They work for you – you don’t care about program versions anymore, just have access to your data. Anywhere, anytime.

Related posts: CNet, Ars Technica, Compiler , An Antic Disposition, AppScout, Security Watch, Download Squad, Blackfriars’ Marketing, Feld Thoughts. The winning title comes from The J-Walk Blog: Office 2003 Downgraded With Service Pack 3.

Update: Phil Wainewright brings up an entirely new aspect of this issue: Microsoft breaks the perpetual licence covenant.

Filed Under: Personal Productivity, SaaS · Tagged: , , , , , , , , ,
post

25 Tips for a Better Wiki Deployment + 1 Tip on How to NOT Use Presentations

Posted on December 18, 2007 ·

Thanks to Stewart Mader I found this presentation on 25 Tips for a Better Wiki Deployment. As someone deeply interested in wikis and their use in business, I attempted to read through, but grew increasingly frustrated. Not because of the content, which is good, but the format. Why on earth have they (who?) delivered this in a presentation format?

All slides in this deck are divided in two half, one textual, the other graphical. Consequently they all show signs of the two cardinal sins of “committing” presentations.

1. – There’s way too much text. If you want me to read a story, you might as well type it up, use paragraphs, title fonts, bullet-points…etc, but don’t pretend it’s a presentation.

2. – Visuals are supposed to illustrate your point, capture my attention, shocking me, entertain me – whatever, just do something! This slide deck uses identical (rather boring, but that’s beyond the point) graphics on all 25 slides, which is just as good as no graphics at all.

In summary, the textual half of each slide is way too busy, the graphical half is a missed opportunity: this is NOT a presentation.

What’s a good presentation like? Enjoy the winners of the World’s Best Presentation Contest on Slideshare (hat tip: Guy Kawasaki)

Filed Under: Collaboration, Personal Productivity · Tagged: , , , , , ,
post

The Wait is Over – Zoho Show 2.0 is the Real Deal

Posted on December 12, 2007 ·

If there’s one application where the benefits of collaborative creation, sharing, easy access from anywhere speak for themselves, that’s presentations. After all, we rarely create presentations to ourselves: it’s a one-to-many, or more typically few-to-many situation. But dealing with version number 115 of the Sales Presentation, just figuring out which one is current, let alone contributing to it while someone else might be working on a different version is a nightmare – and when you’re ready to present, you’re still prone to accidents like this.smile_embaressed

However, until now, we did not have a truly powerful online Presentation tool. Today (actually, on the weekend) it all changes: Zoho Show 2.0 is a truly PowerPoint-class application to collaboratively create, edit, show and share online presentations.

The user interface has been completely revamped, and you can start building your presentation by picking one of the 50+ default themes. You’ll find extensive support for shapes, clip-art, flow-charting, bullets and numbering. Images can be easily manipulated, rotated, flipped around.

Most presentations don’t start from scratch though (you had to get to version #155 somehow..), so Zoho’s import facility is now significantly improved. I’ve tested it by importing several PPT decks that had suffered some deterioration in Show 1.0 – they come out perfectly in 2.0.

Show 2.0 now is a perfect online replacement for PowerPoint, except for transition effects, which are in the plans for Zoho. And that’s a comparison from a single user’s point of view. But again, presentations are rarely single-user projects… Zoho Show has built in Chat to facilitate work with your co-creators, and it also integrates Zoho Meeting, a full-blown conferencing, desktop-sharing application. Here’s Wired on the subject:

Given the slew of new features and slick interface, it makes more sense to compare Zoho to Powerpoint than other online competitors like Google. But even against desktop apps Zoho Show comes out a ahead in many areas — version control, sharing, online collaboration and ability to embed finished slideshows on your website are all features you won’t find in most desktop applications.

As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words, so I’ll stop talking – here’s a Show 2.0 presentation instead:

There’s also a video, which I am not embedding, as my blog often chokes while waiting for Viddler…you can easily watch it here though.

Finally, that remark above about the weekend: this is not a pre-announcement, Zoho Show 2.0 is ready, I’ve played with it. However, the servers will be updated this weekend, as there may be some downtime involved, and the Zoho team is trying to minimize the inconvenience. Show 2.0 is expected to be available late Sunday.

Read more on: TechCrunch, Read/WriteWeb, CenterNetworks , Mashable!, Between the Lines, Wired, Zoho Blogs

(Disclaimer: I am an Advisor to Zoho)

Update (12/15): The update appears to be done, if you log in to your Zoho account, you’ll see Show 2.0. (Remember, the update was expected later during the weekend, I’ve just accidentally discovered it now, which does not mean it’s really complete – the Zoho team might very well be still tuning it.)

There are some amazing slideshows in the Public presentations area, like this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this and this, just to pick a few.

Filed Under: Collaboration, Personal Productivity, SaaS, SMB / SME, Startups · Tagged: , , , , , , , , ,
post

Microsoft is Freeing Users from Office-Prison

Posted on November 30, 2006 ·

The likely reason news of Microsoft’s Office 2007 “Kill Switch” did not cause a lot more uproar is that it surfaced during Thanksgiving week:

“Buried in a Knowledge Base article that Microsoft published to the Web on November 14 are details of Microsoft’s plans to combat Office 2007 piracy via new Office Genuine Advantage lockdowns.

Office 2007 users who can’t or won’t pass activation muster within a set time period will be moved into “reduced-functionality mode.””

As unpopular as this move will be, it’s perfectly within Microsoft’s rights to dump users who don’t become customers. The question is, is it a smart move? ZDNet attempts to do the math in The economics of Microsoft’s kill switch:

“Would you sacrifice $10 million in sales to prevent $1 billion in software piracy? How about $100 million? How many customers would you annoy?”

I don’t think it’s simply a numbers game. Whatever Microsoft’s “loss” to piracy is, it’s not going to be converted to sales. First of all, the “kill switch” comes with the retail product, large corporate customers volume licence is not affected.  So we’re talking about smaller businesses and individuals (I am focusing on the US market). A fraction of these may be “forced”  to buy a licence, but the large majority won’t.   What we really need to look at is why these users run MS Office in the first place.

“The simple argument that ‘this is good enough for 90 percent of what we do’ has fallen on its face over and over and over again,” – Microsoft would like us to think.

I don’t buy it.  I don’t use fancy features in Word, have repeatedly stated that my Excel skills are on the level I learned using Lotus 1-2-3 – yet I have Office on my computer.  So does virtually anyone who occasionally needs to receive/send files to Corporate America.  Not because they need all the features, but out of fear (losing compatibility) and laziness.   But believe me, these users will rather switch to another product than shell out hundreds of dollars for a MS licence.

They might actually find the experience quite rewarding.  OpenOffice is a free alternative, but it’s big, clumsy, needs installation and updates just like MS Office – web-based alternatives, “Office 2.0” products are increasingly powerful, fast, easy-to-use, and allow one to access files anywhere.  It’s safer in the cloud smile_wink.
Office 2.0 vendors bend over backwards to make it easier to work with Microsoft files.  Zoho ( a Client of mine) has a full online Office Suite that easily imports MS files, and of course saves your work in doc, xls and other MS formats, just as well as PDF and several others.  The Zoho Quickread plugin allows opening of any MS Office files directly from the browser (IE, FF) without first importing/converting them. Tomorrow Zoho will release plugins for the major MS Office products, making it easy to save files online directly from within the Office applications.

The danger for Microsoft is not the direct financial impact of these users turning away from their product, since the never paid in the first place. It’s losing their grip; the behavioral, cultural change, the very fact that millions of people – students, freelancers, moonlighters, small business workers,  unemployed – realize that they no longer need a Microsoft product to work with MS file formats.  Microsoft shows these non-customer users the door, and they won’t come back – not even tomorrow when they are IT consultants, corporate managers, executives.  That’s Microsoft’s real loss.

Update (11/30):  See TechCrunch and the Zoho blog on the new announcements.

Related articles by Zemanta
Filed Under: Business, Personal Productivity, SaaS, Software, Technology · Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,