It's not a "lazy attack" on the tool, but rather the fact that presentations are mostly used for a unidirectional storytelling and thus most typically suited for all-hands or sales meetings with a specific agenda that is meant to be accepted without discussion or argumentation.
For design documents, strategy discussions and the like, it is very useful for both the author/presenter to be able to think through the entire thing and present it as a consistent, interconnected document that does not lend itself to a list of bullet points; bullet points typically imply that there is a cutoff between the individual concepts being addressed, whereas things often occupy some position in the latent space and it is helpful to be able for authors to find inconsistencies in their reasoning, discovering new ways of doing things, and for other reviewers to be able to validate the presented reasoning and data points and reach the same conclusion as a way of ensuring that the document is in fact, correct, and thus arrive at an agreement regarding the topic at hand.
There are many organizations which mostly see document writing as a way to satisfy the bureaucratic machine, and therefore reasoning often turns out to be not as important. These places love presentations; and in an ironic twist, the very blog we're discussing offers such a product that is mostly aimed at said bureaucracies.
I think this sentence in the article (and quote from Jeff) says it all: "PowerPoint is really designed to persuade. It's kind of a sales tool".
And by Powerpoint, Jeff I believe refers to the concept of slides, and not the tool itself.
> And by Powerpoint, Jeff I believe refers to the concept of slides, and not the tool itself.
pretty sure about that
but also every time I have to use PowerPoint instead of some other tools for presentations I'm surprised how bad it somehow is (at least the Office360 web version)
For design documents, strategy discussions and the like, it is very useful for both the author/presenter to be able to think through the entire thing and present it as a consistent, interconnected document that does not lend itself to a list of bullet points; bullet points typically imply that there is a cutoff between the individual concepts being addressed, whereas things often occupy some position in the latent space and it is helpful to be able for authors to find inconsistencies in their reasoning, discovering new ways of doing things, and for other reviewers to be able to validate the presented reasoning and data points and reach the same conclusion as a way of ensuring that the document is in fact, correct, and thus arrive at an agreement regarding the topic at hand.
There are many organizations which mostly see document writing as a way to satisfy the bureaucratic machine, and therefore reasoning often turns out to be not as important. These places love presentations; and in an ironic twist, the very blog we're discussing offers such a product that is mostly aimed at said bureaucracies.