Robert Gaskins Home Page

“At this scale, PowerPoint’s impact on how the world communicates has been immeasurable.”

“One of the things that quickly becomes apparent is that PowerPoint was actually invented. Creative, structural, novel and non-obvious decisions were made about it. Decisions that were responsible for its success, decisions that summoned a whole software category to life and defined it to this day. … it would be easy to assume that PowerPoint was inevitable—as natural a part of ‘office’computing as word processing and spreadsheets. Not true.”

“ … she talks with a group of eighth graders … who are stuck at home because of the coronavirus pandemic. To entertain themselves, they hosted a PowerPoint party on Saturday. Each of them prepared a slide presentation on a topic of their choice (ranging from astronomy to unsolved murders to Disney princesses) and shared it with the others over the videochat software Zoom. They … explain the appeal of a PowerPoint party over other kinds of virtual hangouts.”

“The software that emerged as ‘Presenter’ more than thirty years ago, then became PowerPoint and its brethren, has transformed the way we teach and hold meetings and manage relationships and worship. … Recognizing the ubiquity and epistemic imperialism of the slide deck, many artists—including David Byrne, Tan Lin, Daniel Eatock, Timothy Evans, Michael Riedel, Linda Dong, Simon Denny, and Tony Cokes—have taken up the medium, adapting its modes of address to comment on contemporary managerialism, information labor, and media culture.”

“On the crumbling wall of a former C18th foundry in a small town in England, there is a short notice. It reads ‘in this furnace, Abraham Derby frst smelted iron ore with coke and thus began the modern age.’ It is perhaps misleading to compare Abraham Derby’s extraordinary innovation with ‘the world’s frst laptop presentation’ in Paris in 1992, and yet Robert Gaskins and his colleagues have to be credited with a development that has radically transformed the way in which knowledge is communicated and instantiated. … a seemingly innocuous innovation has had a profound impact, not only on science and education, but business, the law, medicine, and even religion.”
—Christian Heath
(Professor of Sociology,
King’s College London)

“Two women struggle to make a PowerPoint Presentation.”

“A fantastic founders story told by founder and creator of PowerPoint, Bob Gaskins. This book details all aspects of the history of the product from before the genesis (founder origin) … . It details the journey after the acquisition of Forethought through their move to Sand Hill Road R&D offices, the full rewrite in C++, and becoming a cornerstone of Office for Windows and Mac.”

“PowerPoint achieved a degree of ‘world changing’ that few products do; from the boardroom to the classroom to the courtroom to the pew, PowerPoint has defined how people deliver information, good, bad or otherwise.”

“In a series of over 200 1‒3 page almost-‘blog’ posts, Bob details many specific scenarios such as deciding which platforms to target, which tools to use, the first screen presentation, transition to color Mac, and more. This is enormously fun to read.”
—Steven Sinofsky
(former Senior VP of Office and former President of Windows at Microsoft)

“Makennah Gatica, who is in eighth grade in Lubbock, Tex., knows exactly what she wants for Christmas: record albums, Puma sneakers, posters and slippers, all relating to her love of BTS, the South Korean boy band. To convince her mother to buy some of these items, Makennah, who is 13, created an 85-slide PowerPoint presentation. … Rather than just emailing the document, she delivered its contents in person, standing before her mother to make the full audiovisual pitch. ‘I like to add music and do my own intros and stuff,’ Makennah said.”

“Wearing a black shirt and headset mic, the speaker paces the stage, expounding upon each new bullet point that appears on the screen behind him, while thousands of audience members sit in rapt attention before breaking into roars of laughter … it’s comedian Demi Adejuyigbe … and he’s delivering the joke with boring old office software that’s recently found a second life in the comedy world: PowerPoint.”

“PowerPoints are popping up on Tinder profiles and being sent to first dates … they’ve officially transitioned from the classroom and boardroom to the Garden of Earthly Delights that is modern pop culture … .”

“ … this is the same story as Uber, right? This is the same story as Instagram. It’s just in an office environment and with PCs. It’s incredible that there was instant product-market fit, even as the product changed so dramatically. The world wanted exactly what PowerPoint was—the first, second, and third times. And … PowerPoint right now owns 95 percent of that market. That is, that is unreal.”

[With the PowerPoint acquisition, Microsoft Office has] “ … probably done over three hundred billion dollars of revenue since the beginning of Office, and just Office, not including Windows ... I don’t think it would be where it is today without having PowerPoint.”
—Ben Gilbert

(length: 01:13:58, includes transcript)

“PowerPoint is one of the most successful, enduring and influential pieces of software ever invented. … Bob Gaskins was the man behind it.”

“(Robert Gaskins) envisioned the user creating slides of text and graphics in a graphical, WYSIWYG environment … . The presentation would spring directly from the mind of the business user, without having to first transit through the corporate art department.”

Discussion of: The Improbable Origins of PowerPoint

“PowerPoint is so ingrained in modern life that the notion of it having a history at all may seem odd.”
—David C. Brock (writing in IEEE Spectrum)

“Perhaps it really should not come as a surprise that the generation schooled to use PowerPoint, when faced with new requirements, would find innovative ways to use the tool they already knew well.”
—Robert Gaskins

“… new research showing that [PowerPoint] remains as popular with young tech-savvy users as it is with the Baby Boomers. An online poll by YouGov showed that 81% of UK Snapchat users agreed that PowerPoint was a great tool for making presentations.”

“Today’s PowerPoint is an incredibly powerful piece of software, which has been three decades in the making.”

“More generally, for a given alphabet size a, a PPTXTM [PowerPoint Turing Machine] with n states and m tape cells uses O (n2 + m2) animations and O (nm) AutoShapes.”
—Tom Wildenhain

Presentation: Video, view from YouTube (5 mins 33 secs)

Paper: Preprint (PDF, typeset in PowerPoint), download from CMU

PowerPoint File: PPTX, download from the author’s website

The original US trademark registration for PowerPoint, 1987, pre-Microsoft (click to enlarge).

“ ‘POWERPOINT,’ as a coined word in English, is original. Given that the documented evidence was insufficient to prove that ‘POWERPOINT’ had become a generic name, the trademark ‘POWERPOINT’ could function as a source identifier and was registrable as a trademark.”
—Beijing High People’s Court, 26 December 2016

For why and how the word was coined, see also the history of the name in Conversation with Robert Gaskins.

“PowerPoint succeeded because it spread rapidly by viral transmission … every time early adopters used our product effectively, they demonstrated its value to other potential customers.”
—Robert Gaskins

Part 1: Deal of the century? How Microsoft beat Apple to buy PowerPoint for $14 million
Zamzar Blog, 10 June 2016
“ … we had been fortunate to launch our PowerPoint product just at the same moment that Microsoft had become convinced that they needed essentially the same product.”
—Robert Gaskins

Part 2: Life before the web — Running a Startup in the 1980’s
Zamzar Blog, 13 July 2016
“You had to plan ahead a great distance and ‘call the shot’ accurately, since a considerable investment was required before much in the way of feedback, let alone sales, could be available.”
—Robert Gaskins

Part 3: The dream boss? What it was like to work for Bill Gates
Zamzar Blog, 21 Sept 2016
Bill Gates on decentralized knowledge within Microsoft: “We don’t lack the power to enforce our decisions; we lack the information about what we should require.”

“To my surprise, applying PowerPoint best practices to my date proposal made me a better dater.”
—Jessica Guzik

(Hat tip: Tyler Cowen, Marginal Revolution )

“Steve Jobs once said that the personal computer was like a ‘bicycle for the mind.’ PowerPoint was the first product to make that a reality for millions of us.”
—Russell Davies

(The original publication was 29 Reasons to Love PowerPoint . Davies presents it as a web essay styled to resemble the typography of Edward Tufte’s elegant books—a vast improvement over Wired’s edited version.)

“Berkeley alums from across the board are notorious for doing amazing things with their degrees.” Five examples of “Berkeley brilliance”: Doug Engelbart, Paul Debevec, Marguerite Higgins Hall, Robert Gaskins, and Madelyn Dunham (Barack Obama’s grandmother).

Discusses in part how PowerPoint got its name. In a comment, someone suggests he may be the person who had earlier trademarked “Presenter” for software, thus forcing the extra thought to come up with the distinctive name “PowerPoint.”

“Microsoft's earliest acquisition, PowerPoint … may have been more valuable to Microsoft than any of the more than 100 acquisitions it has made since.”

“PowerPoint Karaoke … half improv comedy, half parody of corporate culture, and a way to reclaim one of the most loved—and reviled—computer programs of all time.”
—Kate Lunau

“These days scientists are never far from their e-mail, rarely touch paper and cannot lecture without PowerPoint. If electronic media were hazardous to intelligence, the quality of science would be plummeting.”
—Steven Pinker, Harvard

“Sometimes I look at the links of what people are creating, and I think, my goodness this is interesting. It’s turned into something far beyond traditional presentations, something that when we were creating it, we never could have imagined.”
—Robert Gaskins

See also: PowerPoint Heaven

“PowerPoint is not simply a presentation tool, but is also capable on leveraging into other areas such as creating games, artworks and animations.”
—Shawn Toh (MVP PowerPoint)

(Click to enlarge slide)

“When we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war.”
—Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal

See also: Letters to the Editor: A Tool Only as Good as the User with responses from readers, New York Times, 30 April 2010:
“Don’t blame the messenger: The problem is not in the tool itself, but in the way that people use it—which is partly a result of how institutions promote misuse.” —Peter Norvig and Stephen M. Kosslyn

and: Does the Military Overuse PowerPoint? , “The Tank,” Military.com, 28 April 2010:
“With Powerpoint, the military has been moving toward an oral tradition and away from the written word, with all the demands for precision, nuance and serious exposition that writing requires. And it's not just a problem for the military.” —Michael Gordon

“Smartest acquisition … PowerPoint [because it] later became one of the core programs of Microsoft Office, which for many years has been the dominant office productivity suite.”
—Preston Gralla

“ 看来，IT这个当今世界最活跃的因子，一旦与其他科学元素联系起来，总会迸发出令人惊艳的创造力。”
—冯磊 (Lori Feng)

“I do quarrel with logic that says ‘Stupid people are associated with X, therefore X is stupid.’ Stupid people are associated with everything.”
—Larry Wall

“… presentation software developed by Robert Gaskins and Dennis Austin for the American computer software company Forethought, Inc.”
—Encyclopædia Britannica Online, retrieved 23 Dec. 2008, s.v. “Microsoft PowerPoint”.

“It seems to me most people choose the wrong time periods for thinking about work/life balance. … A startup is a chance to balance out your work and life over many decades.”
—Robert Gaskins

“How [Berkeley] grad students and alums led the design of personal computers,” thirteen of the key contributions including “the world’s most pervasive software program for presentations, PowerPoint.”
—Dick Cortén

“In four slides or less, please provide readers with content that captures who you are. … You are limited to text and static images to convey your points.”
—Chicago GSB Admissions

“By adding PowerPoint to its application, Chicago thinks it might attract more students who have the kind of cleverness that can really pay off in business, and fewer of the technocrat types who sometimes give the program a bad name.”

“Don't bother with a long detailed written business plan. Most VCs will either fund a startup based on a fleshed out PowerPoint presentation of about 20 slides, or they won't fund it at all.”
—Marc Andreeson

“We like business plans that present a lot of information in as few words as possible. The following format, within 15-20 slides, is all that's needed … .”
—Sequoia Capital

“by far the best part of [Gomes’s] column is the reflections of Robert Gaskins and Dennis Austin, the creators of PowerPoint”
—Stephen J. Dubner

“We should give it to the Iraqis. We’d never have to worry about them again.”
—Peter Feaver, Duke University

“I used to use PowerPoint to make my slides. I still think PowerPoint is a perfectly good application.”
—Linus Torvalds

“Poking a finger into the eye of thought … .”
—Edward Tufte, Yale University

See also: The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within , by Edward R. Tufte (2nd ed., Graphics Press, 2006), in which Tufte expands his observations to a 32-page booklet.

(While at his website, don’t fail to buy his justly famous books on analytical design.)

Also, in longer interviews, Don Norman (Northwestern), Bob Horn (Stanford), Richard E. Mayer (UCSB), Gene Zelazny, and Seth Godin discuss PowerPoint and respond to Tufte.

“PC Magazine didn’t review it. We were PC snobs. … Three years after that … we did review it.”
—Cade Metz

Also summarized in The Top 8 Innovators of the 1980’s , PC Magazine, Vol. 26 No. 9, 12 April 2007.

“ … one of the most pervasive and ubiquitous technological tools ever concocted.”

“Beware of PowerPointlessness.”
—Jamie McKenzie

“Next time the Pope gives one of his Easter Sunday addresses off the Vatican balcony, odds are he’ll use PowerPoint.”

“If anything, Powerpoint, if used well, would ideally reflect the way we think.”
—Steven Pinker, MIT

“Now that Vugraphs are so easy to create and change, the world has run amok with the giddy power of presentation graphics. A new language is in the air, and it is codified in PowerPoint.”
—Bob Lucky, Bell Laboratories

And, nearly 30 years later, Escaping The PowerPoint Prison by Paul McFedries, IEEE Spectrum, Vol. 54 No. 4, April 2017, page 25.

“… we’ve had three unbelievable record-breaking fiscal quarters since we banned PowerPoint. Now I would argue that every company in the world, if it would just ban PowerPoint, would see its earnings skyrocket.”
—Scott McNealy, Sun CEO, 1997

A 10-year test of McNealy’s “profit by banning PowerPoint” idea.

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