More than 500 million people worldwide use Microsoft’s (MSFT) PowerPoint presentation software.
Manoj Bhargava isn’t one of them.
The billionaire philanthropist and corporate executive who founded 5-hour Energy drinks has little use for the program, which enables users to translate ideas, facts, and figures into digestible visuals.
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Thirty million PowerPoint presentations are created daily using the program developed in 1987 by Robert Gaskins and Dennis Austin for the software company Forethought Inc.
Originally called Presenter, Microsoft bought the program for $14 million three months after it was released.
“Back then, Rick Astley’s ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ was topping the charts, people were lining up to see The Princess Bride, and computers were evolving new capabilities in displaying colorful graphics — forever changing the way we interact with our digital assistants, as well as each other,” Microsoft said in a July 2023 post.
The billionaire industrialist and philanthropist Manoj Bhargava wants to cut through the nonsense.
Jacqui Frank
Microsoft PowerPoint has global reach, but that doesn’t mean you should use it
PowerPoint 1.0 for Apple’s (AAPL) Macintosh shipped from manufacturing on April 20, 1987, and the first production run of 10,000 units was sold out.
The software giant noted that when PowerPoint came onto the scene, “most group presentations in classrooms and conference rooms used overhead projectors.”
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“Remember those machines?” Microsoft said. “They were bulky, displayed limited visuals, and oftentimes [were] blurry or difficult to focus.”
Outside the office, PowerPoint is used by people to present ideas about why people should date their best friends, according to Time Out.
The event was put on by Pitch-A-Friend Los Angeles. That’s a local chapter of a national franchise that runs PowerPoint presentation nights at a rotation of bars where people get to act as wingmen and wingwomen for their single friends.
So, yes, it’s popular, it’s been around for a long time, and people are finding all kinds of uses for it.
Bhargava remains unimpressed.
The billionaire, who is majority owner of TheStreet’s parent, The Arena Group (AREN) , recently launched his The Business of Everything podcast, where he talks about how to get ahead in the real world.
“I see so much stuff that’s just nonsense because it’s taught by people who’ve never done business,” Bhargava said during an interview with Loren Torres, head of social and video for sports at The Arena Group.
“You’ve got professors, you’ve got consultants, you’ve got all of these people, and they teach you this stuff which is just wrong,” he added.
5-Hour Energy billionaire: We’re not 5 years old
In the course of his career, Bhargava has interviewed many people, and he has run into a common issue.
“I said, ‘Well, what do you do all day?'” he explained. “And he goes, ‘well, 35%, 40% of my time goes to making PowerPoints or something.’ Sorry? When do you actually do your work if you’re spending 40% of your time doing PowerPoints?”
Related: 5-hour Energy billionaire launches podcast for the average investor
Bhargava is hardly alone in his disdain for the program.
Edward Tufte, professor emeritus of political science, statistics and computer science at Yale University, once said that “PowerPoint presentations too often resemble a school play – very loud, very slow and very simple.”
Peter Novig, a former director of research and search quality at Google, said “PowerPoint doesn’t kill meetings, people kill meetings.”
“But using PowerPoint is like having a loaded AK-47 on the table,” he added. “You can do very bad things with it.”
And then there was James Mattis, former commander of U.S. Central Command, who once declared that “PowerPoint makes us stupid.”
Communications consultant Garr Reynolds said, “There is no question that PowerPoint has been at least a part of the problem because it has affected a generation.”
“It should have come with a warning label and a good set of design instructions back in the ’90s,” he said. “But it is also a copout to blame PowerPoint — it’s just software, not a method.”
Bhargava has been moved to declare PowerPoint persona non grata in his company.
“We’re not five years old,” he said. “We don’t need pictures. Just make bullet points, just one-page bullet points. I don’t need circles and stairs and charts and graphs and… Why? It made no sense. Especially if you’re wasting all this time.”
