Dennis Austin, who performed a seminal position in shaping how data is communicated in trendy society because the principal software program developer of PowerPoint, the ever-present and infrequently scorned program employed by workplace employees, lecturers and bureaucrats, died Sept. 1 at his house in Los Altos, Calif. He was 76.
The trigger was lung most cancers that metastasized to the mind, mentioned his son, Michael Austin.
Launched in 1987 by Forethought, a small software program agency, PowerPoint was the digital successor to overhead projectors, remodeling the labor-intensive course of of making slides — a process usually assigned to design departments or outsourced — to at least one the place any worker with a pc might level, click on and rearrange data with a mouse.
“Our customers had been conversant in computer systems, however in all probability not graphics software program,” Mr. Austin wrote in an unpublished historical past of the software program’s growth. “They had been extremely motivated to look their greatest in entrance of others, however they weren’t savvy in graphics design.”
Working alongside Robert Gaskins, the Forethought government who conceived the software program, it was Mr. Austin’s job because the software program engineer to make PowerPoint (initially referred to as Presenter) straightforward to function. He completed this with a “direct-manipulation interface,” he wrote, that means that “what you might be modifying seems precisely like the ultimate product.”
Initially focused for Macintosh computer systems, which had a graphical interface, Presenter included methods for customers to include graphics, clip artwork and a number of fonts. As well as, the slides may very well be uniform with graphic borders, company logos and slide numbers. The objective, Mr. Austin wrote, was “to create displays — not merely slides.”
In his e book “Sweating Bullets: Notes about Inventing PowerPoint” (2012), Gaskins wrote that “Dennis got here up with not less than half of the foremost design concepts,” and was “fully liable for the fluid efficiency and the polished end of the implementation.”
“It’s a great wager,” Gaskins added, “that if Dennis had not been the particular person designing PowerPoint, nobody would ever have heard of it.”
Just a few months after PowerPoint debuted, Microsoft purchased Forethought for $14 million in its first main acquisition. By 1993, PowerPoint was producing greater than $100 million in gross sales. Microsoft finally added PowerPoint to its rising suite of Workplace applications, together with Phrase.
PowerPoint is now used to create greater than 30 million displays a day, the corporate says. However on its path to office dominance, the software program has been derided by company executives, enterprise faculty professors and navy generals for dumbing down displays right into a mind-numbing morass of interminable bullet factors.
“I hate the best way folks use slide displays as a substitute of pondering,” Apple’s Steve Jobs mentioned in Walter Isaacson’s 2011 biography. “Individuals would confront an issue by making a presentation. I needed them to interact, to hash issues out on the desk, quite than present a bunch of slides. Individuals who know what they’re speaking about don’t want PowerPoint.”
He banned the software program. So did Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. “And it’s in all probability the neatest factor we ever did,” he mentioned at a management convention in 2018. As a substitute, Bezos made executives write narrative-style memos to share earlier than conferences began. (Bezos owns The Washington Submit. Interim Submit chief government Patty Stonesifer sits on Amazon’s board.)
On the Pentagon, PowerPoint is each pervasive and reviled.
“PowerPoint makes us silly,” Gen. Jim Mattis, secretary of protection below President Donald Trump, mentioned at a 2010 navy convention, in line with the New York Instances in a narrative in regards to the software program headlined, “We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint.”
“It’s harmful as a result of it may possibly create the phantasm of understanding and the phantasm of management,” Military Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster advised the paper. “Some issues on this planet aren’t bullet-izable.”
A fee convened by NASA to analyze the disintegration of the house shuttle Columbia in 2003 recognized a PowerPoint slide that used “sloppy” and “vaguely quantitative phrases” that obscured “life-threatening” questions of safety with the car.
“The Board views the endemic use of PowerPoint briefing slides as a substitute of technical papers as an illustration of the problematic strategies of technical communication at NASA,” the fee’s report mentioned.
Mr. Austin and Gaskins acknowledged the complaints, however thought they had been unfairly aimed on the software program and never the individuals who had been utilizing it to make lazy, poor displays.
“It’s similar to the printing press,” Mr. Austin advised the Wall Avenue Journal in 2007. “It enabled all kinds of rubbish to be printed.”
PowerPoint’s ubiquity and particularly its facility in creating tedious, endless displays made it the uncommon piece of software program to cross over into the cultural lexicon.
This system has been satirized on “Saturday Night time Stay,” in Dilbert comedian strips and by New Yorker journal cartoonists, together with Alex Gregory, whose drawing of an government satan interviewing one other satan is captioned, “I would like somebody nicely versed within the artwork of torture — have you learnt PowerPoint?”
Dennis Robert Austin was born in Pittsburgh on Might 28, 1947, and grew up within the suburb of Rosslyn Farms. His father ran an affiliation for executives, and his mom was a typist and later a homemaker.
He studied engineering on the College of Virginia. Whereas there, he labored with a room-sized pc protected by glass. College students wrote applications on a machine that generated punch playing cards that had been then fed into the pc by specifically skilled pc operators. The applications ran all night time, and college students returned the subsequent day to see the output.
Finally, Mr. Austin befriended the operators, who allowed him behind the glass at night time to work immediately with the machine.
After graduating in 1969, he did graduate work at Arizona State College, the Massachusetts Institute of Expertise and the College of California at Santa Barbara. He then labored for firms together with Common Electrical, Honeywell Worldwide, Burroughs, Nationwide Money Register (now NCR) and Tandem Computer systems.
In 1984, after being laid off by a start-up engaged on battery powered laptops, Mr. Austin was employed by Forethought, which was based by two former Apple workers.
After Microsoft acquired Forethought, Mr. Austin continued to guide growth of PowerPoint. He retired in 1996.
Mr. Austin married Janet Ann Kilgore in 1972. Along with his spouse and son, survivors embody a granddaughter and brother.
Mr. Austin’s family and friends mentioned he by no means minded the jokes about PowerPoint. He was additionally nicely conscious his software program was getting used for displays far past those he had supposed it for, together with marriage ceremony proposals, teenager pitches for greater allowances and whilst props in stand-up comedy routines.
In 2005, Mr. Austin was within the viewers at a College of California at Berkeley occasion the place David Byrne, frontman of the rock band Speaking Heads, gave a PowerPoint presentation about utilizing the software program to create artwork.
“PowerPoint is the Rodney Dangerfield of software program: It will get no respect,” Berkeley engineering professor Ken Goldberg, the occasion’s organizer, mentioned. “It’s straightforward to ridicule it for its company nature, however the true story is about how participatory and democratic it’s. Highschool youngsters use it, rabbis use it, folks even use it for marriage ceremony toasts.”