From the "You can't you make this stuff up" Dept. — a Swiss political party has named itself the Anti-PowerPoint Party and is launching a campaign to bring an end to Microsoft's presentation software. In other news, yes — those are cheers from marketers you hear.
The APP claims PowerPoint costs the Swiss economy €1.7 billion annually, thus its stated goal: "In the future, those in companies, congresses, universities, schools, who want to renounce PowerPoint*, should not have to justify themselves any longer. We do not want to abolish PowerPoint*; we only want to abolish the PowerPoint*-CONSTRAINT."
As arguments go, that one has more holes than, well, Swiss cheese.
Explaining the "The path to our goal" the party states that "Our international movement shall be noticed by the world media." OK, it caught our attention — along with folks at NPR, Boing Boing and others bemused by the odd party's focus.
Further explaining itself, the party leadership states that it's the "advocate of approximately 250 Million people worldwide, who, every month, are obliged to be present during boring presentations in companies, universities, or at other institutions, and who had up to now no representation in politics."
A noble humanitarian cause on a par with the Nobel prize, to be sure. The party's great solution to the global PowerPoint scourge? "The alternative is using the FLIP-CHART!" We kid you not.
It's either an elaborate prank (in which case, nicely played!) or a marketing stunt to push a book, The PowerPoint Fallacy, written by (surprise!) M. Poehm, president of the Anti-PowerPoint-Party.
While Microsoft isn't losing sleep over this assault, PowerPoint has been attacked before. In 2003, The New York Times asked if PowerPoint "makes you dumb." (And here we thought it was Google.)
Edward Tufte, a professor at Yale University and the American leader of the anti-PowerPoint movement, has gone so far as to suggest NASA's shuttle explosion was due to, in part, PowerPoint. While we wouldn't expect NASA to adopt the humble flip-chart, Tufte isn't just some crackpot; last year, President Obama appointed him to serve on the Recovery Independent Advisory Panel.
Yet, as the excellent Freakonomics crew has pointed out, "Don’t Hate PowerPoint; Hate the PowerPointers," saying it's not PowerPoint that's evil, just that it encourages "a kind of bullet-point thinking that’s just not that interesting."
A (Power)point well taken?
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