The "Microsoft Method" of presentations

Microsoft did not invent PowerPoint. That honor goes to a small company called Forethought, which released PowerPoint for the Mac in 1987. The company was then purchased by Microsoft and the Windows version of PowerPoint eventually hit the market in 1990...and the world hasn't been the same since.

But did Microsoft invent the wordy, bulletpoint-ridden PowerPoint slide approach, the approach ridiculed by Edward Tufte and so many others? I don't have the answer to that, but judging from the presentation visuals (slides) used by high-profile Microsoft executives, the company is certainly perpetuating this approach, an approach we'll call the "Microsoft Method."

Examples of the "Microsoft Method" of presentations
You can find a plethora of the actual PowerPoint files used in many Microsoft presentations, including those by CEO, Steve Ballmer and Chairman, Bill Gates. The company also provides many video streams to past presentations, often including written transcripts.

On November 7, Steve Ballmer kicked off the "Ready Launch Tour." The audience for this presentation and others on the tour consist mainly of developers and database administrators. The keynote presentation was at a high-level and not overly technical. The presentation was more of an opportunity for the CEO to show his leadership, vision, and what it all means. I don't have any problems with the content of Steve Ballmer's keynote (that's not the focus of this blog anyway). My focus here is only on the slides he chose to use to support his messages. Below I show a few slides from Steve Ballmer's keynote (you can download his PPT file here). But first, allow me to introduce another concept from the Zen aesthetic we can refer to when examining these visuals and our own visuals.

Shibumi
Shibumi is a principle that can be applied to many aspects of life.  Concerning visual communication and graphic design, shibumi represents elegant simplicity and articulate brevity, an understated elegance. In Wabi-Sabi Style, authors James and Sandra Crowley comment on the Japanese deep appreciation of beauty:

Their (Japanese) conceptualization relegates elaborate ornamentation and vivid color usage to the bottom of the taste levels...excess requires no real thought or creativity. The highest level of taste moves beyond the usage of brilliant colors and heavy ornamentation to a simple and subdued refinement that is the beauty of shibumi, which represents the ultimate in good taste through conscious reserve. This is the original "less is more" concept. Less color — subdued and elegant usage of color, less clutter...

                                        — Wabi Sabi Style

I do not suggest you judge a presentation visual the same way you do a work of art, of course. But understanding the essence of shibumi can have practical applications in your creative work. And I believe presentations are best viewed as creative endeavors — all of it — preparation, design, and delivery.

Examples from Steve Ballmer's Nov 7 Keynote

     
Above left: Saying thank you is a wonderful, gracious thing to do, especially at the beginning. If you use a visual for this, a simple "Thank You" without the noise of a busy template, catch phrase (Ready), and three different logos would be better. I like the background color for this visual, but it doesn't fit with the bulk of the slides which have a familiar blue background. Above right: Suddenly a blue background. A lot of images to convey a simple point. The images of people in the bubbles are labeled "People"... in case we weren't sure those were images of people?

     
Above left: It would be better if Steve had broken this up into three slides with declarative titles for each, less colors and fewer bullets. Above right: I get it, but a simpler, more elegant visual was surely possible.

               
Above left: Many colors. Gradients. 3-D effects. Small text. When you are one of the most powerful business figures in the world, it's better if your presentation visuals do not resemble a cereal box.

     
Above left: More 3-D graphics, gradients, colors. Above right: Nothing closes big quite like a bulleted list on a "Summary" slide.

It all matters
You might say, "So the PowerPoints aren't great? So what? Content is what matters." Content does matter a very great deal. Great content is essential. But my point is: It all matters.

Microsoft says the sky's the limit for us consumers. Work can be creative. We can help. I want to believe them. Really I do. Yet, when given the opportunity to show how one of their most visible products can actually be used practically and harmoniously to help their own speakers present important ideas, they revert back to PowerPoint-as-usual. Uninspiring...and typical.

A Flash pitch on the Microsoft "your potential" website says "we stand in awe of your potential." Their whole campaign evolves around this one message: “Your potential. Our passion.” And templates, auto-content wizards and "paper-clip guy" are suppose to help people be more creative?

What must it be like inside the Redmond campus? If top management is implying that this is how best to present, then what incentive do regular workers have for being different, creative...and more effective? But surely not all the people at Microsoft, a company which attracts great minds from across the planet, agree with the typical "death-by-PPT" approach?

Microsoft has smart, creative employees who get it
I think it's very cool that Microsoft allows employees to blog on the company. That's smart. One new MS employee, Prof Elizabeth Lane Lawley, currently working in Redmond on sabbatical from RIT comments today on Microsoft's love affair with the PPT deck in her post called The Culture of The Deck:

"There are many things I’ve been delighted and impressed by during the nearly five months I’ve now spent at Microsoft. However, there have also been a few things that I’ve found extraordinarily disheartening. One of the latter has been the organizational dependence on “the deck” (that is, PowerPoint files) as the standard mechanism for conveying nearly all information."

                                         — Elizabeth Lane Lawley

The professor goes on to say that the Presentation Zen site, Beyond Bullet Points and Tufte's The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint should be required reading for employees. Right on, Elizabeth!

Here's hoping a new way of presenting will one day make it up to the top levels of Microsoft management.

Comments

[andrew hollister]

After a quick once over of Ballmers ppt file I am in awe of how little PowerPoint they actually use in making his slides.

Going by the amount of aliased text... I only counted 33 text boxes, the rest of that mess came out of Photoshop (created by someone with a serious addiction to layer effects)

If anyone can make bar charts like that in PPT, please let me know. When I need Fluff, I will create my charts in 3dsMax.

Having said that, I see nothing wrong with using Photoshop to create your graphics; I work the same way, using PowerPoint as my playback device.

BUT for the company selling the app.... herm.

[Andrew Hollister]

Another thought:
Granted the text with soft drop shadow could have been created on PPT for Macintosh but I doubt the Windows Corporation would use OS/X for their executive presentations.

[met]

Why do you keep comparing MS and Apple slides? The amount of content they convey in their presentations are different. And most of Apple presentations are product launches for consumers. While MS is selling to developers, etc - which require the slides to be more technical.
Apple slides are useless after the presentation. MS uses them after presentations which is why they can be downloaded and the message stays on.

About colors - MS is consistent with its usage of colors. Blue, Green, Orange and sometimes Red. You see 10 such presentations - nothing will stand out any more :)

--Are there any presentation slides of apple during their developer conferences? I would be interested to see how the make all the details concise.

[Garr]

> Why do you keep comparing MS and Apple slides?

I was not comparing this presentation to any Apple presentation. I didn't mention Apple even once.

And yes, you can see Steve Jobs' Keynote to developers here:

http://www.apple.com/quicktime/qtv/wwdc05/

[charlie]

my company uses ppt in the same way elizabeth mentions ms does - as a document crammed with info.

i've been fighting that trend for years, but the most recent defeat was when i tried to stick to 10 slides and simple concepts and was out-manouvered by another team that used professional graphics artists to create 44 very info-full slides.

sigh.

it is at these moments that i doubt my storytelling skills matter. i'm sure if i used the kawasaki method (which i wanted to), i'd be thrown out of the meeting (i'm very much a storyteller and verbal - i always die when trying to use ppt, which i think has been adversly affecting my progress in the company!).

i wonder if you have any info (cross-tabulation?) of audience (visually minded, verbally minded) versus subject matter (product pitch, product intro, information session). i work in the tech field pitching new ideas to foreigners - my storytelling might be lost on them without plenty of text and busy graphics (especially stuff they can read before the meeting).

sigh.

[met]

Charlie's dilemna was what I was trying to get at in my previous comment.:)

I guess the best solution in such a case (where slides should be useful outside the presentation) might be to 'attach' comments with the slides.

Any other suggestions? (apart from what MS does).

When I said you were comparing apples and oranges, I meant the past 2 weeks as a whole.

[Garr]

>I guess the best solution in such a case (where slides should be useful outside >the presentation) might be to 'attach' comments with the slides.

Yes, this would be better than slides alone. But you are still limited by how much you can write (that's not *always* a bad thing) in the notes view.

To Microsoft's credit, they do provide written transcripts of the keynotes. There's your "handout" of sorts.

>Any other suggestions? (apart from what MS does).

Better to have slides/visuals separate from the handout. I talked about this in the last post (the sound of one room napping).

>When I said you were comparing apples and oranges, I meant the past 2 weeks as >a whole.

I know what you mean. But SJ's presentation situation to developers is not too dissimilar from SB's presentation to developers. *IF* Bill Gates' recent presentation and Steve Ballmer's recent presentation were of a very technical, low-level nature, then you may be correct that it is "apples & oranges." But Ballmer's and Gate's presentations were much more of the high-level, strategy, vision, marketing variety. These were not overly technical, though certainly there was a lot of industry jargon that would make the MS presentations less understandable to "non-techies."

My point: What is technical about bullet points and slides filled with ugly clip art and bad Photoshop images?

Frankly, the more technical the presentation, the less useful bullets may be. If I were to give a highly specialized, technical presentation to a group of, say, fifteen engineers, I would probably distribute a paper document to analyze the data (tables, graphs, etc.) and promote discussion. I would not use slides for such a group. If I needed to occasionally show a color photographic image, I could show the images off the iPod connected to the Plasma display next to our conference table. The TV screen remains blank except when needed.

The high-resolution of paper would allow for deeper and better graphical representation of the issue. Generally, I think PPT for meetings is inappropriate, especially for technical meetings where data needs to be dug through, analyzed, and questioned deeply.

For teaching situations, PPT is useful as a kind of slide projector (especially for art history profs, architecture profs, etc.). But handouts and other documents are better for the classroom, I think. Better for stimulating discussion, looking at data, and serving as a hard-copy takeaway for students.

To Charlie:

How about giving your foreign clients a well-written document (with an abstract and summary of conclusions) containing appropriate detail, and graphical representation of that detail as needed a head of the meeting? During the meeting/presentation, you could give your presentation sans-PPT, telling your "story" or "pitch" and hand out appropriate paper documentation as needed for your audience to examine the data you're talking about.

[Ricardo Beltrán]

Nice to see this at the Web, I'm a Java programmer and now really interested in .NET, then I assisted to the launch event of VS in Mexico City, I was really dissapointed with that event and I just stayed one hour and suddenly I ran away, that was one of the worst
computer conference I've seen in my life, plenty of cheap marketing stuff. Do not misunderstand VS is a great product (in my point of view) but Microsoft style to communicate that was really boring!.

[Sebhelyesfarku]

Steve Ballmer is a moron, a monkey boy. "Developers, developers, developers..."

[Tony]

You're missing a key piece of information in all this analysis:

VIRTUALLY 100% OF MICROSOFT'S EXECUTIVE PRESNETATIONS ARE FORMATTED BY A VENDOR CALLED SILVER FOX.

http://www.silverfoxprod.com/content.php?flash=yes&uni_id=3

And, Sebhelyesfarku, read this and then try to get yourself to continue believing that Steve Ballmer is a moron: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/28/business/yourmoney/28ballmer.html