Dennis Austin, who performed a seminal function in shaping how info is communicated in fashionable society because the principal software program developer of PowerPoint, the ever-present and sometimes scorned program employed by workplace employees, lecturers and bureaucrats, died Sept. 1 at his dwelling 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, reworking the labor-intensive course of of making slides — a job sometimes assigned to design departments or outsourced — to at least one the place any worker with a pc might level, click on and rearrange info with a mouse.
“Our customers have been accustomed to computer systems, however in all probability not graphics software program,” Mr. Austin wrote in an unpublished historical past of the software program’s improvement. “They have been extremely motivated to look their finest 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) simple to function. He completed this with a “direct-manipulation interface,” he wrote, which means that “what you might be enhancing appears 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 might be uniform with graphic borders, company logos and slide numbers. The aim, 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 no less than half of the key design concepts,” and was “fully chargeable for the fluid efficiency and the polished end of the implementation.”
“It’s an excellent guess,” 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 ultimately added PowerPoint to its rising suite of Workplace packages, 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 army generals for dumbing down displays right into a mind-numbing morass of interminable bullet factors.
“I hate the way in which individuals use slide displays as a substitute of considering,” 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 Put up. Interim Put up 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 underneath President Donald Trump, mentioned at a 2010 army convention, in keeping with the New York Instances in a narrative concerning the software program headlined, “We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint.”
“It’s harmful as a result of it will probably create the phantasm of understanding and the phantasm of management,” Military Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster advised the paper. “Some issues on the planet are usually not bullet-izable.”
A fee convened by NASA to research 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 automobile.
“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 have been unfairly aimed on the software program and never the individuals who have been utilizing it to make lazy, poor displays.
“It’s identical to the printing press,” Mr. Austin advised the Wall Road Journal in 2007. “It enabled all kinds of rubbish to be printed.”
PowerPoint’s ubiquity and particularly its facility in creating tedious, never-ending 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 want somebody effectively versed within the artwork of torture — are you aware PowerPoint?”
Dennis Robert Austin was born in Pittsburgh on Could 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 packages on a machine that generated punch playing cards that have been then fed into the pc by specifically skilled pc operators. The packages ran all night time, and college students returned the subsequent day to see the output.
Ultimately, 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 Normal 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. Gaskins continued to steer improvement of PowerPoint. He retired in 1996.
Mr. Austin married Janet Ann Kilgore in 1972. Along with his spouse and son, survivors embrace a granddaughter and brother.
Mr. Austin’s family and friends mentioned he by no means minded the jokes about PowerPoint. He was additionally effectively 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 increased 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 simple to ridicule it for its company nature, however the actual story is about how participatory and democratic it’s. Highschool children use it, rabbis use it, individuals even use it for marriage ceremony toasts.”