It seems that among the numerous wars that the Pentagon is called upon to
wage, one of the latest is against PowerPoint. Pentagon staffers, called
upon to prepare briefings, have apparently become PowerPoint addicts, beefing
up their presentations with special effects of every sort, as an extension
of the slide briefing which was already a tradition by them. The basic idea
was that more is better, so if you're talking about troop movements, why
not have tanks moving across the screen, and while we're at it, why not
throw in some sounds of explosions as well. The problem is two-fold. On
the one hand, although presentations of this sort may be interesting and
convincing the first time we encounter them, and perhaps even the second,
after a short while
the Dragnet effect seems
to take over. On the other, effect-laden presentations take up a great deal
of disk space, and things got to a point at which so many byte-heavy presentations
were going through the Pentagon's e-mail that they clogged down the passage
of other, more important messages.
An
article about this is a fun read.
Maybe it's a sign that I'm getting old, but I think that
this is the first war situation in which I've found myself on the same
side as that of the Pentagon.