OwerPointpay also abused by execs of Icrosoftmay

I don't know whether solace or outrage is the proper response to a speech I saw last week by a Microsft VP who will go nameless.

I won't even reveal the subject of the speech, other than to say that it was informative enough and the speaker was dynamic enough.

Enough, at least, to overcome the arrogant and provincial attitude of the speaker who tossed in a dozen casual references to all the "really smart people" who work at Microsoft. He did so in a way--and with a frequency--that betrayed the collective Microsoft corporate attitude that your company is brimming with dummies.

But the speech was not good enough to distract me or anyone else in the audience from one of the worst PowerPoint presentations in memory.

As the people around me began to grumble妖oesn't Microsoft make PowerPoint?悠 wrote in my notes, "Monday blog: Microsoft doesn't know how to use PowerPoint either."

My only question was, what to feel about this smug little discovery.

Solace: The Microsoft boss made the same sorts of mistakes everybody else does: Ridiculous amounts of unreadable copy on ridiculous numbers of slides. Absurdly complex graphics delivered by terribly distracting bells and whistles. All resulting in an audience that spent an hour squinting confusedly at the screen while the dynamic exec charged almost irrelevantly around beneath and beside it.

Outrage: Isn't there somebody inside Microsoft用erhaps the boss of those "really smart people" who come up with a new and improved version of PowerPoint every year謡ho knows or cares one whit about how the program helps and hinders communication? Maybe Microsoft isn't motivated to have that really smart PowerPoint boss share his or her really smart wisdom with the rest of us dummies. But at the very least, somebody ought to train Microsoft executives to handle their own software at least a little better than the rest of us.

No?