Happy Birthday, PowerPoint!

Happy birthday to the one program it seems everyone loves to hate...PowerPoint. It turns 20 years old today.

Robert Gaskins realized in the 80s that there would be a huge market for preparing business slides with graphics-oriented computers. With programming done by Dennis Austin, PowerPoint 1.0 for Macs came out in 1987. Later that year, Microsoft bought the company for $14 million, its first acquisition, and three years later a Windows version followed.

Robert Gaskins' Web site, www.RobertGaskins.com, is a great source of PowerPoint commentary (both pro and con, with pertinent Dilbert cartoons as a backdrop).

Lee Gomes, interviewing the duo in the Wall Street Journal, writes:

While the two certainly know how to use PowerPoint, neither consider themselves true power users. They don't even know many of the advanced features it has come to sport. They also have no patience with cubicle warriors who, in the guise of doing actual work, spend endless hours fiddling with fonts. And they like telling the joke that the best way to paralyze an opposition army is to ship it PowerPoint and, thus, contaminate its decision making, something some analysts say has happened at the Pentagon.