PowerPoint and its discontents

My Observer column of January 12 was about the pernicious way PowerPoint has sapped the will to think of the corporate world. Now, courtesy of the wonderful Arts and Letters Daily, comes a flood of insightful pieces on the same topic:

Here, for example, is a lovely essay by Julia Kelly published on January 22. Thomas Stewart is calling for PowerPoint to be banned. And presentation guru Edward Tufte has even entered the fray with a scathing piece on PowerPoint graphics. Quote:

“The original table, so effective, collapses into incoherent chartjunk. … Everything is wrong with these smarmy, chaotic graphics: scaling, low resolution, color codes, breaking data into pieces, branding, an indifference to data and evidence. Poking a finger into the eye of thought, these graphics would turn into a particularly nasty prank if used by cancer patients seeking to discover their survival chances. “

Meanwhile, if Lincoln had had PowerPoint here’s how the Gettysburg Address would look.

Another Microsoft virus goes unreported

“Attack Overwhelms Internet, Slows Traffic”, says an AP report in the NYT. But we get half-way down the story before it is revealed that the new virus is actually exploiting vulnerabilities in, ah, Microsoft software. “Rick Miller, a spokesman for Microsoft Corp., however, confirmed that Internet congestion was interfering with administrators trying to download the crucial software patch that Microsoft made available to protect vulnerable computers.”

But now comes the really funny bit: For it turns out that “the same congestion also completely prevented consumers from contacting Microsoft over the Internet to unlock the anti-piracy features of its latest products, including the Windows XP and Office XP software packages.” Verily, you could not make this stuff up. But why doesn’t the headline say Virus exploits Microsoft vulnerability, screws up Internet?