Despite being a hugely popular, widely used tool around the world, PowerPoint may not be long for this world – at least according to one insider.
Writing for How To Geek, tech journalist Tony Phillips noted a potential smoking gun among Microsoft’s own 365 Roadmap. He notes that it has some 820 updates currently in development, testing or deployment, of which just 19 mention PowerPoint – and even these relate to other integrations, such as Copilot.
None whatsoever concern the actual PowerPoint app.
Phillips therefore asked the question whether Microsoft is quietly de-prioritising PowerPoint, potentially seeing it as old-fashioned within today’s productivity environment.
Of course, the market shows that presentation tools still have their place, with the likes of Google Slides and Apple Keynote all more recent developments but ones offering similar features (despite not getting anywhere near the level of ubiquity as PowerPoint).
Others, however, have been openly hostile to PowerPoint – including Amazon chief Jeff Bezos who has banned it at the company, claiming that slide decks allow ideas to be glossed over and compressed down rather than given freedom to flourish.
Bezos’s preferred approach is to provide staff members with Word documents and the time to digest information contained therein, before the issue is then discussed openly.
What he may have missed, however, is that, according to the Visual Teaching Alliance, 90% of the information transmitted to the brain is visual, and that graphics are processed 60,000 times faster than text.
Of course, one argument as to why PowerPoint is receiving fewer updates is that it simply doesn’t need them. The program has been in use for nearly four decades – so any adjustments now would be evolutionary not revolutionary. It has seen competition from others and fought them off valiantly – even when some other Microsoft tools haven’t fared so well.
Weighing up both sides, Phillips concluded that, after all, “it seems difficult to justify the view that PowerPoint will be a thing of the past any time soon” and that a lack of updates may not suggest a slow death, but instead a program that works well just as it is.
