Microsoft Wins, Loses

Having just finished doing an MBA I can tell you in no uncertain terms that MS Office is an amazing suite of software. Powerpoint has a lot of the basic functions of Photoshop, yet is simple enough for the non-techy to use. Sure, they are really overly “interfacey” preferring sub-menus and wizards to more natural usage, but these are to meet the needs of the non-tech-savvy who use the software, and I’m prepared to power through that and learn the keyboard shortcuts that will make my use of it fast and easy.

With all of that said, the programs could be so much better! The feature that seems like the biggest missed opportunity is SmartArt in PowerPoint. If you’ve never used that feature before, basically it’s a little menu that will help you make the nice graphics that make bullet points so much easier to digest. The problem is there are only 88 that come by default. After 2 years in school, I had pretty much exhausted all of the good ones.  For people who make presentations as part of their full time jobs, I imagine they got sick of them within months.

But there is an easy way to fix this. If they had included a way for a person to build their own SmartArt and then share it with others, then we could all design our own, or for the less image-inclined, browse a site with thousands of them. Open source or creatives commons licenses lead to free exchange and lets users “remix” to customize their experience.  Who would have thought that PowerPoint had a potential social media angle, albeit an unexploited one?

However, MS is so controlled with their products that they don’t have the imagination do this.  I’m not an MS hater, but I wish they would take more chances on their products in favour of openness. I think in this case we’d all be better served.