So here’s a good problem to throw out to the group. It doesn’t matter if you’re an individual or a business, at some point in your life you probably had to pitch something or other, and very likely you used PowerPoint or one of its clones. But imagine you had a consultancy and you had to make a strong impression on a client. You know that all the other consultancies would be using PowerPoint and you wanted to do something different; you wanted to differentiate yourself. How would you do it?

I’m going to make it slightly more ambitious:

Imagine you had to build a competing product to PowerPoint. Knowing the parameters of the application—it’s easy to create content, it’s a standard so everyone can use it, it’s portable, cross-platform, visually strong, and cheap—what could a competing product look like to you?

The way, I’m thinking about this is as follows. An obvious way to differentiate yourself, is to be louder than other people. But that brings some problems in terms of sustainability. You could use multiple speakers and act out something, but this requires you to always bring more people to a presentation (as well as train them), which is not always feasible. You could create something in code or on video, again requiring significant time, expertise, and resources to make this happen, and it might not be very portable. Etc. etc.

No, if you wanted to compete with PowerPoint, the market-leader, you would have to appeal to the same economic sentiments, which lead people to choose that software in the first place: portable, easy to create content, cheap, etc.

So…

• what would you do?
• what do you do?
• or what have you seen done?

Really curious what you come up with!

Premise: this was a small part of an exercise, I had to do as part of an application-procedure today. It was pretty fun, my solution was pretty creative, though no one was really thinking about the sustainable part, about actually building a product. But it made me wonder… what if? Go crazy!

Vincent

P.S. I know about Presentation Zen. I just barely have enough energy to type this post, let alone read a website.

Like

Unlike