Mary Meeker’s Entire Bummer PowerPoint on Her Internet Outlook
by Kara Swisher
Posted on November 6, 2008 at 12:05 AM PT
BoomTown is no fan of PowerPoint, but this one by longtime Morgan Stanley Internet and technology analyst Mary Meeker at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco yesterday is made worse by its depressing content.
Meeker, a veteran who was around for the last Web 1.0 meltdown, should know from grim. An inveterate numbers cruncher–I actually met her 15 years ago, while she was crunching a different set of numbers on AOL late into the night at her New York office–she pulls out a lot of tough ones here.
Still, as usual, from the typically forward-looking Meeker, there is hope eventually.
But let’s let her show you, via the presentation she made yesterday.
Here it is (click the screen icon in the right corner to make it larger):
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Comments
WOW.
Lot of information there.
Posted by Mac Beach at November 6th, 2008 at 11:07 amgood overview of how things happened BEFORE.
but history is a rear-view mirror, not a front windshield view
Posted by Sam Harrison at November 6th, 2008 at 12:49 pmi didn’t read this as ‘bummer’
her comparisons are to 2000 in some slides, that’s when cpm ads were high and easy vc money bought them
good job mary
Posted by Sam Harrison at November 6th, 2008 at 12:51 pmThat’s not a presentation, it’s a document dumped into PowerPoint and it would have been better kept as a document. Watch the videos of PowerPoint used as a visual and interactive medium on http://www.aspirecommunications.com (not my site, unfortunately) and you’ll see it used at the other end of the ‘presentation spectrum’.
Posted by Steve Hards at November 6th, 2008 at 1:15 pmSteve: No… the problem with Powerpoint (as well as the imitators) is that the emphasis is too often on the tool and what it can or can’t do rather then on the data itself.
Making a “database” of Powerpoint slides sounds like an expensive and cumbersome way of re-inventing html and web pages.
One reason that document might have been put into that format though rather than just left in it’s original Word, Powerpoint, or whatever format it was in was to make it hard to borrow from it.
I would have rather had a spreadsheet with the numbers in it as well as a downloadable PPT file, but then I could go around giving talks and pretending to be as smart as Mary Meeker.
Posted by Mac Beach at November 6th, 2008 at 4:13 pmHi Mac, that’s an interesting thought, but in my view the whole notion of ‘presentation’ has become seriously warped by people throwing up slides with text so small that no one in the audience can read them – and if they are reading them, what’s the point of having a presenter? May as well have a document.
It’s not the fault of PowerPoint as a program – well, not much anyway – when Microsoft chose to default slides after the title slide to bulleted lists they undermined the basis of PowerPoint as a user-friendly graphics program.
Anyway, a light has dawned! I thought ‘bummer’ in the article title referred to the style of the presentation, but maybe it was supposed to refer to the content of the message?
Posted by Steve Hards at November 7th, 2008 at 1:26 pm