[onion2k]

I'm not so sure about that. Specifically in the case of PowerPoint (or decks in general really) distilling ideas down to 4 bullet points that are 6 words each means you lose a lot of detail. People will fill those gaps with their own assumptions. That leads to a lot of confusion.

Jeff isn't really anyi-powerpoint. He's pro-detail. Rather than a deck he asks people to share a doc, and has time in meetings to make sure everyone has read it.

I wouldn't be that surprised if people having the same understanding of goals, projects, and ideas in detail had a material impact on Amazon's success. It leads to much better collaboration and far less waste.

[al_borland]

The point of PowerPoint isn’t to have a bunch of detail, it’s basically to provide the outline, visuals, and key points, while the presenter fleshes that out with all the details by presenting it. A PowerPoint deck on its own isn’t that valuable. The value comes from pairing it with the speech.

If you have an excessive amount or technical details, then having everything writing down and distributed to similarly technical people is probably the better way to go.

It’s important to know your audience and what you’re trying to convey to them. Adapt as needed to best solve for that.

[drflorl]

> far less waste.

While it’s much faster to create presentations today with AI, every time I’ve worked with PowerPoint on my own and especially SharePoint PPTs, it’s been a massive waste of time.

However, I’ve only seen a doc presented on big screen in a large company meeting once. It worked, but looked unprepared. I assume that the alternative is sending out the memo ahead of time and then just discussing it?

[unsnap_biceps]

Amazon's method was that you hand out hard copies of the doc at the start of the meeting and everyone reads the doc in silence for the first ~15 minutes. Once everyone has read the doc, then discussion starts.

[dathinab]

in general I agree

but also PowerPoint (the product) is kinda terrible at allowing you to efficiently, low time investment create presentations for am internal meeting which then get discarded. And the web version is even worse.