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Can Google Kill PowerPoint?
theodp writes "Far from a PowerPoint killer, Slate's Paul Boutin finds Google's online presentation tool Preso more like a PowerPoint commercial — a half-baked app that shows how powerful Microsoft's program really is. But if you have your druthers, Boutin suggests ditching both and opting for Apple's Keynote, which helped snag an Oscar for Al Gore and inspired this Dear-PPT-Letter. 'The first hurdle ... You can't use it on a plane. Google Preso only works if you've got a live, high-bandwidth Internet connection. You can save the finished product to an HTML presentation on your laptop, but you can't edit the saved version or upload it back. The Splunkers would need to finalize their presos early in the morning in a rented conference room, where both Wi-Fi and Verizon wireless cards have been known to fail. That would kill the presentation.'"
Doing an important presentation that is 100% reliant on perfect internet connectivity is currently a stupid, stupid idea. It might work ok for presentations on your home turf in company meeting rooms but for remote presentations, training and sales it is a totally not yet ready for prime time idea. Someday perhaps, but not today. There are enough things that can go wrong with a presentation without using an on line app.
Does anyone else think all presentation software should be banned, on the basis of services to humanity?
Conclusions: we should just abandon the concept, and save zillions of hours of wasted office time every year.
(But it won't happen, because it would expose managers who suck.)
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Nobody should use Powerpoint in the first place unless the presentation is tried and true, and the visual stimulus actually adds value to the presentation. I had so many professors in College who sucked at teaching and the fact that they used Powerpoint just made it worse. It was usually just long winded quotes straight out of the text in a font too small to read on the screen. You would have to go over the powerpoint before class or print it out just to be able to read it thus totally defeating the medium.
The Point is that people shouldn't be using Powerpoint or anything like it unless they have the time beforehand to make it something usefull.
That's where the Google Gears technology is supposed to step in and let you bring your content offline. While not yet ready for prime time, I wouldn't be surprised to see it integrated with all the Google Docs applications in the next 6 months.
What you really learned is even more fundamental - it's not done till it's tested. Keep that in mind and you'll go wrong very infrequently.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
While I know it's all the rage to imagine everything from Office to Photoshop as a web app, I simply don't want to rely on having an internet connection for anything that doesn't inherently require it (browsing the web, using ftp, ssh or email, etc). Widespread access to the internet is not universal access to the internet, and connection quality varies so greatly, that I don't want to have my productivity beholden to the whims of the local network (if there even is one) that I happen to be using, and deal with the fact the processing power of my machine has been rendered irrelevant thanks to someone downloading 500 simultaneous HD hentai torrents.
Even if everything works 100% of the time, it is still an unnecessary layer of vulnerability, and not just from a security perspective, but from a "I can never know for sure that the experience will be the same each time I run the app."
On my machine, I know a crap app will run poorly each and every time, and that a well-done app will most likely perform as it should each and every time.
Anytime, anywhere access with predictable performance is something that no online app developer can offer, and I'm not going to move to any of their products because of that.