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How PowerPoint stole the stage

April 2026 · 12 min read

2026, a phone call

"Hey, listen, I've been meaning to catch up, how have you been, how's the family?"

"Hey, nice hearing from you. Good, we're all doing well. What have you been up to?"

"I'm working on this project I'm really excited about, would love to grab a coffee and tell you all about it."

"We'll see with the coffee…but send me the deck, I'll take a look."

"..."

There was something lost here. Feelings were compressed, the story was zipped, emotions were stripped - they didn't fit in the deck. That was a case of Death by PowerPoint, and this is an investigation. How did we get here? Whose fault is it? What happened? What do we do now?

My thoughts are especially strong on the last one, I promise to not let you leave empty handed, or headed, granted you bear with me until the end. But let's not skip to the future just yet, because like in any serious investigation, we have to start with the past.

Before the dawn of the bullet point

PowerPoint, originally Presenter, was released on April 20th, 1987, pushing 40 at the time of writing. In software ages, that's colossal, it's hard to imagine a time before it, yet there was.

Long before the first deck

We've been holding presentations for a very long time. The year is now 3500 BC, we're about to enter the Bronze Age, and writing is close to being invented.

There is a crowd of about 30 people gathered around a fire, feasting, in silence. Almost silence, there is one voice breaking it. A young man, in one of the inner circles, is speaking. He's telling a story, about a hunt. The tracking, the circling and finally the hit. He's taking the crowd through the exact emotional journey he went through as he was chasing, body filled with adrenaline, the prey.

He didn't learn how to "control the crowd", how to "capture attention", it was maybe as inborn in him, as walking on two feet was. There was nothing more than the presenter, his voice and body, to keep the crowd listening, a difficult job even today, no presenter notes either, and yet they somehow did it. In fact, they did it magnificently. They informed, entertained, persuaded, motivated and taught this way.

However, one could argue civilization, or the infancy of it, was very different back then, so it's only fair we take a look at a lesser distant past.

Short before the first deck

Grab your suits, we're now in the 1950s. We've seen the rise of electricity, automobiles, the war(s) have passed, we have television, the economy is booming, there are now jet airliners, what more could you ask for?

Oh yes, we didn't have decks.
And we didn't need them.

We have now been through the rise of the Magic Lantern - hand painted glass slides projected by light behind them, Photographic lantern slides - showing even more resolution and precision, and finally got to the brand new Slide projectors - 35mm photographic slides in carousels, the very bleeding edge of high tech.

But what were they used for if we didn't have the decks to project? I'm glad you asked, because it turns out we had the decks, just not the type we think of today.

The presentation culture back then was defined by substantial investment, narrative structure, and professional production values. It was almost like shooting a movie, but with a live audience. It required photographers, technicians, designers, and specialized service bureaus operating 24 hours a day.

Over the top? Maybe.

But it was art.

In 1948, we got the Seagram‑Vitarama, a five‑screen, multimedia sales show Seagram used to sell … whiskey. But to call it a deck would be an understatement. Instead of a guy with a flip chart, they staged a full experience: a two‑hour professionally acted play about a whiskey salesman, elaborate physical displays, free drinks, as they said - you had to live it to understand it. The Seagram-Vitarama was the first ever A/V presentation given at a sales meeting, but certainly not the last.

The year is 1984, the lights are dimming in a room full of Apple's sales force and key partners. A 60-second ad, called "1984" starts. One minute later, screen goes black, the room explodes. Lights come back on as Jobs walks on stage, riding the emotional wave the ad created and like a magician pulls the Mac out of a bag like a magic trick, powers it on, lets it "speak" to the audience. And that's "why 1984 won't be like '1984'".

Moment T+0

It's now 1987, Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up" is topping the charts, people are lining up to see The Princess Bride, and computers are evolving new capabilities in displaying colorful graphics. (Microsoft's words not mine)

A small start-up in Silicon Valley hires Robert Gaskins, a Berkeley graduate student who spent a decade studying English literature, linguistics, and computer science. They hire him with the purpose of creating a new application for graphical PCs.

One could argue that presentations were already in Gaskins' blood. His father ran an A/V company, slideshows are like a family friend to him.

On August 14th, 1984, he writes a short two-page document, "Presentation Graphics for Overhead Projection". The birth of PowerPoint, or rather of Presenter as it was then known as. There was one bullet point italicized among all the rest, a deceptively simple idea Gaskins chose to highlight:

"Allows the content-originator to control the presentation."

Slides were a supporting material, a background for the presenter, and Gaskins rightfully thought - the presenter should be the one making them in order for the message to not be diluted in outsourcing.

PowerPoint 1.0 shipped for Macintosh on April 20, 1987.
The first production run of 10,000 units sold out immediately.
Microsoft acquired Forethought just three months later for $14 million.
By 1993, when Gaskins retired, PowerPoint reached $100 million in annual sales.
By 1997, it held 85% of world market share with 20 million copies in use.
By 2003, revenues exceeded $1 billion annually.

Microsoft announced in 2010 that PowerPoint was installed on more than one billion computers worldwide.

Time of … Presenting

The last Kodak slide projector ever manufactured rolled off the assembly line in 2004. It is the era of the bullet point.

But people are using it wrong.

Blasphemy! But it's not me saying it. It is no other than Robert Gaskins himself.

In a 20th anniversary reflection, he acknowledged, and I quote: "more business and academic talks look like poor attempts at sales presentations". However, it's not only the tool to blame, and I agree with him here, he also blamed "mass failure of taste" as much as his creation.

To be expected, when looked back upon

It would be easy to adopt a critical tone now, having the advantage of looking back at the situation, arguing that it's obvious how people would try to make of a tool a sort of "universal hammer", and try to use the hammer on screws and bolts, all because it allowed them to be lazy.

But one couldn't have known that, and at the time, the idea that the presenter could control their own supporting material was indeed revolutionary.

The Evidence File

Today, we have numerous examples of how lazy decks have affected us directly or indirectly for the worse. I would like to bring one such example to your attention for the purposes of our case.

Lost in the small bullets

One of the most tragic examples, and dramatic ones is the loss of the Space Shuttle Columbia and its seven‑person crew during re‑entry on 1 February 2003. How THE HELL is presentation software tied to such a tragedy?!

It's not the software itself, but rather how it was used that was concluded to be a factor of what caused the accident. There was a core technical problem, a core systemic problem and a core communication problem at fault.

The core technical cause: a piece of foam, many hundreds of times larger than previously tested foam pieces, punched a hole in the wing's thermal protection.

The core systemic cause: NASA's safety culture and decision‑making failed to treat that as a possible loss‑of‑vehicle event.

The core communication cause: engineers at Boeing did analyses of foam impacts on RCC and tiles and presented their findings to NASA as a series of PowerPoint slides, 28 slides across several briefings.

One particular slide flagged the attention of the investigation board. It had three critical problems:

Reassuring title, alarming data;
Too many levels of bullets, tiny text;
Vague language.

You read these 3 points, yet they don't mean anything, see? Points are meant as a recap after I already communicated the content, not as the content.

So, let me elaborate. The slide title strongly suggested that tests showed the foam strike was probably survivable, which biased readers before they saw any numbers. Yet buried in the text was the uncomfortable fact: the test foam pieces were about 3 cubic inches, while the piece that hit Columbia was around 1,920 cubic inches, more than 600× larger, so the test regime simply didn't cover the actual event.

Moreover, the slide had multiple bullet and indent levels (six levels of hierarchy), inconsistent font sizes, and over 100 words and figures. The most critical line, that damage grows rapidly beyond tested impact energies, was in small font, low in the slide, easy to skip.

Breaking up Narratives

In his research, Dr. Edward Rolf Tufte, Professor Emeritus at Yale, identified the core problem of how the tool is used: "PowerPoint supports breaking up narratives and data into minimal fragments, a preoccupation with format not content, and a smirky commercialism that turns information into a sales pitch."

supports breaking up narratives;
format over content;
turn information into a sales pitch.

Did I convey the same message? Does it stay the same if you first read the bullet points and then the quote?

Dr. Tufte calculated that typical slides operate at approximately 20% of the information density of standard newspaper or web content, in his words, "about the level of a 3rd grade reading text", at roughly 40 words per slide.

He goes on to compare it with a drug, one "making us stupid, degrading the quality and credibility of our communication, turning us into bores".

Moreover, cognitive research as well as eye-tracking research both point in the same direction - the more complex a slide becomes, the more content rich, the less the presenter feels they need to "explain", the less the audience feel like they need to pay attention. Their eyes bolt to the screen to read the content as fast as they can, the live person in front of them, YOU, the presenter, become the supporting material for the slides.

The moment the slides become "the presentation", the presenter becomes just an accessory.

War against the Slides

"When we understand that slide, we'll have won the war."

In summer 2009, General Stanley McChrystal, leader of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, was shown a slide titled "Afghanistan Stability / COIN Dynamics". An incomprehensible spaghetti diagram mapping counterinsurgency variables. His reaction was the one above, the room burst into laughter. A glimpse of how a 'sales pitch' isn't universally applicable.

At an April 2010 military conference, General James Mattis declared flatly: "PowerPoint makes us stupid." Brigadier General H.R. McMaster, who had banned PowerPoint when he led the successful effort to secure Tal Afar in 2005, explained further: "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."

The corporate world reached parallel conclusions. On June 9, 2004, Jeff Bezos emailed his senior team: "No powerpoint presentations from now on at steam" (Amazon's internal codename).

His reasoning was simple, writing a 20-page PowerPoint didn't actually stimulate understanding of the topic like a narrative structure would have, it just simulated it.

Modus Operandi

How exactly does a deck make us worse at presenting? From all of the above, and even more research, a pattern emerges: Controlling the written content, allows the presenter to shift focus from the often "scarier" part of actually conveying the message. Making the written content cryptic or bullet-ized gives the writer the false impression of understanding, after all our pattern matching brains love the simple task of extracting what seems like important points while skimming through text. Filling the supporting content with lots of data, to have "proof" it was there, masks the lack of self-confidence with a falsified "authority".

And thus, we forget to think about actually talking to the people in the room, the need to understand is falsely fulfilled and furthermore, the audience's attention shifts to the slides and the presenter becomes an accessory, relieving even more pressure from being "on the stage".

We lost the (power) point.

The dusk of the deck

So, we're stuck in deck purgatory, right? Not quite. I'm sure you've seen the recent spike in "storytelling matters". It's undoubtedly a trend, a buzzword for many to, you guessed it, put on their sales decks. But it also signals something deeper, we're collectively waking up. If you have nothing to add to the presentation by being there and speaking, don't even come, just "send me the deck". This is how "the deck" cracks, because what shouldn't be a presentation then becomes absurdly clear, "this could have been a 2-page report and it would have read better".

However, we're about to fall in a different trap now, I avoided it as much as I could up until this point, but it's inevitable I bring it up. AI. The next evolution of bulletization, is not even taking the time to make the bullets yourself, not even skimming through the source material yourself, just a plain "make me a presentation on this topic, use bullet points, the sources are attached".

Sounds familiar? PowerPoint, Google Slides, Keynote - all race to the same destination, the very opposite of Gaskins original idea.

"Discourage the content-originator from controlling the presentation."

Just, "make it for me". Their promise of "let AI handle this while you do the important work" is misleading and poorly thought at best. The AI gets to do increasingly more and more important work, so what is there left for us to do? Scroll and consume?

But don't take me as an AI skeptic just yet, for that I am not. I code with AI, I study with AI, I research with it, I proofread my writing with it, I brain dump ideas onto it, you get the point. I use it, heavily. And it is exactly my heavy user persona that urges me to plead with you:

Do NOT use it to think FOR you. Use it to think WITH you.

Where do we go from here

If you are here purely for "the investigation", feel free to skip to the conclusions now, but I promised to not let you leave empty handed, so I want to tell you a story. What could possibly determine someone to be so passionate about presentations to write up a whole investigatory piece on them?

The year is 2022, a younger me walks on stage at a pitching competition, how I had gotten up to that point is beyond me, I was not supposed to be there, public speaking was maybe my single biggest fear, I was the backup speaker, but I was prepared. I had rehearsed that pitch maybe over 100 times, I had obsessed over every SINGLE bullet point, word and comma in that deck. I walk on stage, open my mouth, blank. I do not remember anything. I might have done fine, but I wouldn't know. I only remember walking again off the stage 5 minutes later, not a single second of in between can be recalled by my memory. I don't think it was a disaster from what I heard after, but that wasn't what mattered. What mattered was that I did NOT die. Not only I did not die, something had been born in me that day, I was still afraid of the stage, but now I was … actively seeking it? Every single chance I had to talk after that, I took, and as I took more and more of those opportunities, my decks shifted further away from "bullet points". A typical deck of mine today has on average 4 fully black slides, purely for talking.

And so, it became evident for me that there has to be a better way, a better tool, to make presentations meant to be, well, presented. This also coincides with the time I started tinkering with these more advanced AIs, and Lantr was born, with a maybe not as sharp quote as its grandfather, PowerPoint, did:

"Something that helps me make presentations worth listening to"

Lantr

Lantr is not yet that, I will not lie to you, it's very much in an early beta, but I feel like the promise is there now. Currently Mac only, limited by design at this time. Shout out to the team, because this was not a one man effort, for pulling this beta off in such a short time. Today we are opening the first 50 spots, we want to personally help onboard and keep in close touch to our first 50 presenters, to the point where if you have a question or suggestion in the middle of the night, I want you to message us directly, right there and then.

I'll personally reach out to a few people whose feedback we'd love to gather, but whoever you are, if you want to speak to captivate and help us shape this thing, shoot me a message on X (Twitter) directly @davidretegan or if you'd prefer go to lantr.app, leave your details and I'll text you first.

Conclusions