Tag Archives: Steve Jobs

SlideShare makes PowerPoint a social application

Microsoft PowerPoint (Mac OS X)
Image via Wikipedia

I hate PowerPoint.  Actually, I don’t hate PowerPoint, I hate how PowerPoint makes it easy for poor communicators to believe they can be the next Steve Jobs.  I’ve sat through excruciating 162-slide presentations done by ‘management’, in 10 point type.  I’ve nearly been blinded by awful color choices.  I’m sure you have too.  I think one of the primary reasons this happens is that most PowerPoint presentations are developed in a vacuum.  The lone PowerPoint ‘artiste’ slaves away, late at night, slapping together random thoughts and cheesy graphics into a massive deck that often misses the point.  SlideShare, the online slide deck sharing site (sort of a YouTube for slideware), has just released a PowerPoint plug-in, that may bring the lonely deck-developer into the social realm.  With the add-on, deck-developers will be able to share their works of art directly from the very non-social PowerPoint, and more importantly, be able to search for inspiration directly from within PowerPoint.  Appropriately, SlideShare has a slide deck to explain the advantages:

Meet the SlideShare ribbon for PowerPoint

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: powerpoint microsoft)


Now, sharing alone won’t solve the awful PowerPoint crisis, but hopefully if we get these people into group therapy, we can save at least one meeting from a cruel and unusual presentation.

SlideShare Presents Your Newest Social App: PowerPoint – ReadWriteWeb

Using the SlideShare Ribbon, users gain the ability to share presentations from within PowerPoint, update existing presentations with new content, search existing SlideShare presentations for examples, download SlideShare content for remixing, and view presentations from contacts and groups. User can also check their SlideShare statistics from within PowerPoint.

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Apple’s flawed foray into Cloud Computing acknowledged by Steve Jobs

Image representing Apple as depicted in CrunchBase

Image via CrunchBase

Ars Technica is reporting that Steve Jobs sent out an internal email that acknowledged missteps in the rollout of MobleMe:

Steve Jobs: MobileMe “not up to Apple’s standards”

“The MobileMe launch clearly demonstrates that we have more to learn about Internet services,” Jobs says. “And learn we will. The vision of MobileMe is both exciting and ambitious, and we will press on to make it a service we are all proud of by the end of this year.”

Apple may get a mulligan this time from the faithful, but the cloud computing space is rapidly becoming the most competitive place on the internet, and such failures won’t be tolerated for long.

My own experience with MobleMe has left me disappointed, and I’ve decided to stay with the google calendar and gmail solution, and added SugarSync to manage my files across computers.

Wired’s story on the secret development of the iPhone

Description unavailableImage by bizmac via Flickr

It’s been a year since Apple unveiled it’s iPhone, which is considered by many to be a revolutionary device.  While that may be true, the greater revolution came from the manner in which the phone was developed and the equation altering manufacturer – carrier relationship that it left in it’s wake.  Wired has done an excellent write up on the process, it’s challenges, and the underlying gamble that Steve Jobs took with the iPhone.  The article starts out appropriately enough:

It was a late morning in the fall of 2006. Almost a year earlier, Steve Jobs had tasked about 200 of Apple’s top engineers with creating the iPhone. Yet here, in Apple’s boardroom, it was clear that the prototype was still a disaster. It wasn’t just buggy, it flat-out didn’t work. The phone dropped calls constantly, the battery stopped charging before it was full, data and applications routinely became corrupted and unusable. The list of problems seemed endless. At the end of the demo, Jobs fixed the dozen or so people in the room with a level stare and said, “We don’t have a product yet.”

It’s hard to imagine many corporations today that would have a boardroom full of people that would tolerate that bit of news from their CEO.  But then again, this is Apple that we are talking about.  Very interesting read, and well written as well.

Read the rest of the story here: The Untold Story: How the iPhone Blew Up the Wireless Industry