How Microsoft Let Skype Lose Out to Zoom: from Bloomberg. “In the technology business, you’re only as good as your last update.”
Santosh Desai on PowerPoint: “We now live in a world with presenters and listeners, where anyone with a presentation gets the floor. The slide presentation compels silence, if not attention. It can be subverted only by the mobile phone, into which a sullen audience peers fretfully, denying the speaker the privilege of their attention. In some ways it is a match made in heaven- between structured banality and a sullen withdrawal of attention. From an earlier era when slides were devices to decant reams of words on to, today, the visual nature of presentations today represent the triumph of shallow aesthetics over braindead meaning…Slide presentation exchange the expressiveness and precision of language with the stilted vocabulary of the narrowly purposeful. It lacks both the beauty of the written word and the meandering power of oral communication. It was once useful, but is increasingly becoming not empty ritual which allows us to play at being people who have something important to say.”
Sherlock Holmes: “The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes.” [via David Perell]
