[bsder]

Mercurial also made the really good decision to support Windows long before git was even functional there. I've got clients who have been using Mercurial on Windows for more than 10 years now. They email bundles to each other and have no problems, whatsoever, and don't even notice git. One quote: "Why would I want to go back to a central repository that I have to be connected to? That's stupid."

Most Windows users, sadly, are simply too backward to use anything that isn't tightly integrated into the Microsoft ecosystem. So, it never really helped Mercurial that much.

GitHub, however, was what drove git.

Unfortunately, Github is to source control as PowerPoint is to presentations. It works--but it's a dumbed-down default and nobody thinks about the fact that there are sometimes much better alternatives for your use case.

[blt]

Not sure I understand the analogy. What is PowerPoint a dumbed-down version of?

[bsder]

An actual textual report? Whiteboards? Overheads? Actual slides? Flip charts? Livecoding?

Powerpoint is optimized for marketing and not much else. It exists because of two reasons:

1) Most people actively suck at presenting something. Forcing them to put their presentation in Powerpoint-standard forces some level of organization on them.

2) A lot of business presentation IS marketing--and Powerpoint is fine for that.

The problem is that a lot of technical communication really doesn't fit into Powerpoint-standard (see: space-shuttle disasters for example). The problem is that now nobody knows how to do anything else and never even thinks about doing anything else.

[blt]

Got it. I thought you were comparing to other software tools.

I'm a big fan of chalk talks for anything mathematical. I find it hard to stay engaged with slides, even if the presenter uses tricks like revealing one step at a time, annotations, etc.