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PowerPoint of Afghan War Strategy
eldavojohn writes "Disillusioned by PowerPoint at work? Some members of the US Military view it as 'an internal threat.' Marine Corps General James N. Mattis says, 'PowerPoint makes us stupid,' reaching the same conclusion NASA came to back in 2003. But nothing speaks to this more than the spaghetti-bowl PowerPoint slide of the US Military's strategy in the ongoing war in Afghanistan. The slide causes anyone's eyes to glaze over with confusion so much that General McChrystal jokingly stated when he saw it, 'When we understand that slide, we'll have won the war.' At my job, I know that feeling all too well."
"PowerPoint makes us stupid"
Does it really take a General to tell us that ? ;-))
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
but it sure would be great if this were the beginning of the end of unnecessary PowerPoint presentations. I can't think of many times when I saw one that was actually helpful.
This ain't rocket surgery.
1. bomb Taliban positions with solar powered laptops running Windows7 with powerpoint installed ...
2. Victory
3.
4. Experience horrible unplanned of blow-back.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
That spaghetti slide has a copyright notice at the bottom, "PA Knowledge Limited 2009"
There must be a joke about oxymorons and military intelligence in here somewhere.
Senior officers say the program does come in handy when the goal is not imparting information, as in briefings for reporters.
General McMaster said in a telephone interview afterward. “Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable.”
Oh, man... the irony
Elen sìla lùmenn' omentielvo
...if PowerPoint makes you stupid, but I sure feel dumber having read that article.
"Powerpoint absorbs huge amounts of time that management, marketeers, and other suits might otherwise
spend doing real harm."
And don't forget those poster sized flip books that were all the rage in the 80's and 90's before digital projectors became commonplace.
Microsoft should absoultely take none of the blame for this. PowerPoint is a tool that does have it's useful purposes sometimes. For example, it's absolutely great for printing shipping labels or making last-minute valentine's day cards.
This signature serves no purpose other than to help you see which posts were made by me.
For that matter, I'm pretty sure the same was possible before we started doing this with software - it was certainly possible with film slides as well.
To err is human. But to really fuck things up you need a computer.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
PowerPoint exposes how stupid we already are.
Basically, it isn't "PowerPoint makes us stupid", it is "Stupid people make us use PowerPoint". But that's true in some ways about the entire suite of MS Office products:
* You haven't worked in an enterprise environment until you've been forced to use MS Excel worksheets as database tables, by managers of the kind who use a $2 calculator to work out the solution before typing that solution into the cell. As these "tables" become unwieldy they are augmented by elabourate macros crafted by the boss' secretary (secretaries wield Excel like witches yield black magic).
* All documentation must be authored in MS Word, even 1000 page technical tomes where Word is ill-suited for the task. All doumentation must be passed around via email, until it clogs the server and someone comes up with the idea of an intranet portal (perhaps even Sharepoint! ooooh! aaaah!). Corporate intranet turns into 90%+ .doc content.
* The more forward-thinking bosses realise that MS Excel is not a database (perhaps because their pet .xls file hit the 65k row limits before Excel 2007 was released). Stupid non-normalised tables imported straight from Excel into Access. Secretary learns how to build even more amazingly byzantine forms and macros, and eventually a whole department relies on a creaky Access .mdb on a network drive with no security where a dozen people run giant queries on un-indexed columns where a proper database server would be more appropriate.
And of course, the whole thing must be supported by an IT person who had no role in crafting this mess.
Powerpoint wasn't designed to make people stupid. Just like the rest of MS Office, it has been comandeered by idiots and forced to their mind-numbing bidding. MSFT products may be low in efficiency and reliability, high on resource consumption and vendor lock-in but they are quite easy to pick up even if they lack the "taste" on famous Steve seems to crave. ON one hand it has helped bring computing to the masses. The other edge of that sword is that it has enabled the semi-literate to misapply all of those applications with minimal effort.
A classic: The Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation.
Media that can be recorded and distributed can be recorded and distributed.
-kfg