Google Powerpoint: An Awful Idea

April 18, 2007 by admin

Official Google Blog: We’re expecting

Well, we tried to keep it a secret as long as we could, but to be honest, we’ve been dying to tell you about the bun we’ve got in the oven. We’ll soon be welcoming a new addition to the Google Docs & Spreadsheets family: presentations.

First of all, we want to welcome the team from Tonic Systems to Google. Tonic, which we’ve just acquired, is based in San Francisco and Melbourne, Australia. They have some great technology for presentation creation and document conversion, and it will be a great addition as we add presentation sharing and collaboration capabilities to Google Docs & Spreadsheets.

We’ve already freed those of you working in teams from the burdens of version control and email attachment overload when going back and forth on word processing and spreadsheets. It just made sense to add presentations to the mix; after all, when you create slides, you’re almost always going to share them. Now students, writers, teachers, organizers, and, well, just about everyone who uses a computer can look forward to having real-time, web-based collaboration across even more common business document formats.

Our due date is this summer. We promise to share family photos just as soon as we can.

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Why is this an awful idea? Because Google knows better. Google, which prides itself on its technical savvy, is wantonly ignoring the well-documented deleterious effects of the “powerpoint culture” on organizational culture and, let’s face it, rational thought.

Strictly a “me too” business decision. Google would be doing the world more of a favor if it deleted *.ppt from its index.

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