Jeff Bezos doesn't believe in PowerPoint, and his employees agree

On the other hand having people at the beginning of the meeting to spend e.g 20 minutes reading and fully focusing on evaluating the proposal sounds really good, let's be honest.

It is easier to ask good questions and provide arguments for and against if you had time to think instead of trying to do it "at fly"

I'm not so sure about that. Specifically in the case of PowerPoint (or decks in general really) distilling ideas down to 4 bullet points that are 6 words each means you lose a lot of detail. People will fill those gaps with their own assumptions. That leads to a lot of confusion.

Jeff isn't really anyi-powerpoint. He's pro-detail. Rather than a deck he asks people to share a doc, and has time in meetings to make sure everyone has read it.

I wouldn't be that surprised if people having the same understanding of goals, projects, and ideas in detail had a material impact on Amazon's success. It leads to much better collaboration and far less waste.

This wisdom is at least certainly more true than claiming the inverse, which is a good indicator. Would amazon be what it is now if everything was powerpoints? It would almost certainly be significantly worse in many areas.

The point about bullet points being trash low effort ways to give information without rigorous thought is self evidently true.

Anyone who is considerate in how they formulate questions before seeking answers will tell you the same thing - often the dedicated formulation of the question leads directly to the answer. By just the same way, giving a full and complete answer can reveal to you a question - which may unravel and destroy your answer, or change the course of your idea.

I feel like the article did not (the irony!) properly explain itself; I made a more detailed explanation of what they're trying to say in another place[1] in this discussion.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44700553

It was a long-standing policy of Bezos to force this approach to explaining your ideas and I think it had contributed a great deal to Amazon's success. For all the complaints about Bezos, one cannot deny he actively built that company and is far from your typical corporate, employed manager, who spills their perls of wisdom on Linked. You see, powerpoint can be a great tool, but it can and will be misused by your typical grifter. Why explain a concept in detail and expose it for discussion, when you can tack on a few vague lines in combination with a few cool pictures and please the so-called 'reptilian brain'? I suspect the liberal usage of powerpoint enables the current dominance of grifters accross tech, and consequently causes a reduction in overall quality of the product (or service).

Exactly. The best argument for me is the vast number of companies that have thrived with PowerPoint.

The navy seals have been on successful missions and they basically only use PowerPoint for meetings , at least the last time I read a book written by someone senior in the leadership…

You're missing the fundamental point. Early Amazon succeeded because it created an evangelical corporate culture of (my words) not permitting inane bullshit, falsity, dress-up, and cargo culting to infect its communications and processes. The Leadership Principles were set up as an intentional immune system to stave off what we now call enshittification. The rigid document and meeting structures were set up to focus on the facts and details rather than fonts and colors and theater.

All of that is orthogonal to diversity in thinking. I spent nearly a decade at Amazon, and I encountered a great deal of diverse thought and communication styles; the systems enhanced that, rather than suppressed it. As long as the baseline standards of clarity, factuality, and logic were upheld, people were free to make arbitrarily creative arguments. Standing in front of a 50-word powerpoint slide with colors and reciting it would not have improved anyone's thought process or enlightened the audience any faster or better.

In many ways they are showcases or demos. They are meant to convey author's viewpoints. There is a set narrative. Unlike the memos mentioned here, they are not drafts that need to be reviewed closely or discussed in meetings.

Good slides are hard to create. It is much easier to write you presentation out in slide format, which makes for bad presentations (but if someone misses you can send them the slides - which won't help for good slides)

I think your point and examples are addressed by this quote from the article:

""PowerPoint is really designed to persuade. It's kind of a sales tool," Bezos explained. "Internally, the last thing you want to do is sell. You want to be truth-seeking. You're trying to find truth.""

They should hire you to be an AI-spotter.

The purpose of presenting isn't for you, it's for audiences. The thought process or lack of it will happen either way, and can be accomplished either way.

You can embed diagrams in documents too. Every scientific paper does this

I hate Powerpoint, it's pointless. It forces linear flow, when in a meeting presenting ideas, linear flow works against being clear, presenting new ideas to people with the authority to stop and ask clarifying questions from earlier. Far too often, a presenter interrupted and asked to reverse their presentation gets discombobulated and the presentation goes south.

For this reason, almost 30 years ago, I abandoned PowerPoint and I only use web browsers and web pages, with links on the pages providing non-linear flow through the material. I can be as verbose or high level as the audience desires, and the presentation material works regardless.

I really don't understand why this perspective is not more widespread. Anytime I discuss it with someone that does presentations for a living, they act like the sun just rose for the first time.