This is odd, since few people love PowerPoint. Hotel Regina is a five-minute walk from the Louvre, but PowerPoint is a universe away from fine art. Gaskins and his colleague Dennis Austin, who passed away earlier this month, managed to create a product that was cheap, ubiquitous to the point of inescapability and widely reviled. How did bad PowerPoint triumph? And what can we learn from that victory?
One lesson is that when it comes to technology, we’re lazy. We reach for the nearest familiar tool without thinking about whether it’s the right one for the job, or even thinking clearly about what the job is. Are we trying to think through a problem? Get a discussion going? Show people that worth-a-thousand-words picture? We skip that vital contemplative step and load up a slide template instead. Because everyone can use PowerPoint, everyone does. That is how highly paid managers, engineers and lawyers end up fussing about fonts and colour palettes.
One can see this by observing much the same tendency in our lazy, indiscriminate use of PowerPoint’s sibling, Excel. Type “SEPT1” or “MARCH1” into Excel and the software will automatically convert those inputs into dates. That is usually fine, but unfortunate if you were a genetics researcher referring not to dates, but to the genes with those names.
The gene autocorrect problem was spotted nearly 20 years ago and appears to be getting worse. The proportion of genetics papers with autocorrect errors was estimated in 2020 to have reached 30 per cent. The Human Gene Name Consortium decided to rename the genes in question, wisely accepting that this would be easier than weaning researchers away from Excel.
The gene autocorrect problem was spotted nearly 20 years ago and appears to be getting worse. The proportion of genetics papers with autocorrect errors was estimated in 2020 to have reached 30 per cent. The Human Gene Name Consortium decided to rename the genes in question, wisely accepting that this would be easier than weaning researchers away from Excel.