Last year, in 2023, Dennis Austin, one of the original developers of Powerpoint passed away. The news was posted on Hacker News, and prompted a lively discussion of the merits of the Powerpoint itself. I posted the following top-level comment (search for my alias Maro), which itself sparked a lively thread of responses. In this post I will expand and extend my points above about Powerpoint in business settings, after pointing to some hard-learned lessons from Edward Tufte and Jeff Bezos.

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Most bets businesses take, be it hiring, features, products or strategy don't work out. Still, many businesses are successful despite setbacks. A negative attitude---even when the analysis of the situation is in fact correct---may be missing the bigger picture.

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