Robert Gaskins built software to replace the overhead projector and reshaped how organizations think.
In April 1987, Robert Gaskins and Dennis Austin released PowerPoint 1.0 for the Apple Macintosh through their company, Forethought, Inc. The software allowed users to create presentation slides on a personal computer and print them as overhead transparencies.1 Three months later, Microsoft acquired Forethought for 14 million dollars, the largest software acquisition in history at the time.2
Within a decade, PowerPoint had become the default tool for corporate communication. By 2001, Microsoft estimated that roughly 30 million PowerPoint presentations were given every day worldwide.3 The slide deck became the lingua franca of business, the medium through which strategies were proposed, budgets were justified, and decisions were made.
Edward Tufte, the Yale statistician and information design theorist, published a widely cited critique in 2003 arguing that PowerPoint’s format forced complex information into bullet points and hierarchical outlines that flattened nuance, weakened evidence, and encouraged presenters to substitute style for substance.4 Tufte noted that NASA engineers had delivered critical safety information about the space shuttle Columbia in PowerPoint format, and that the slide’s structure may have obscured the urgency of the warning.
Amazon banned PowerPoint from executive meetings in the early 2000s, requiring instead that proposals be written as six-page narrative memos read silently at the beginning of each meeting.5 The decision acknowledged what Tufte had argued, that the format shapes the thought, and that thinking in bullet points is not the same as thinking.