Entries RSS · Beating the market-leader, PowerPoint?
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.
Tags: Powerpoint, presentation
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In this kind of fat-client business, it’s not Powerpoint who’s the leader but the format behind Powerpoint: .ppt (or .pptx as Microsoft wishes). Consequently, to outperform Powerpoint, you need to overtake the format (.ppt or .pptx).
Even though your heavy-client was top-of-class, you can’t write a presentation software that’s not .ppt compatible (ex. Apple).
Fortunately, there’s the other option: the Google Docs & Zoho one for instance – who allow users to forget about formats by leaving their documents on the cloud.
Conclusion: Powerpoint-killers are already there. The real question is: who’s goin’ to win the race?
Hey guys,
Couldn’t agree more with Jeremy, the format is the strength of Powerpoint. There are a bunch of software that allow you to make presentations in real-time 3D, with pre-created scenarios, the result looks far batter than any powerpoint you could create by yourself.
But then, another question: is surprising the audience with an innovative format for the presentation really gonna help you make your point? I would think twice about using an alternative way of presentation if I had to pitch VC for instance. Well, obviously, you should know/guess whether your audience is actually up for it..
Like in college, some teachers would appreciate creativity and innovation, some others won’t…
@Vince: what was your solution ?
Guys, I was hoping for a bit more out-of-the-box thinking on this. But ok, two things are true about presentations, which you mentioned. That 1. .PPT(X) is a standard, which is prevalent and hard to beat, and that 2. it’s not really the presentation that matters, it’s the person telling it. And, I guess, looking at famous examples like Guy Kawasaki and Steve Jobs, that there is real tangible evidence for it too. This is why I don’t like market-research before working out an idea, because it can be damn depressing.
Knowing, however, that 99% of the population does not possess the charisma of these two celebrities, and that everyone uses a non-differentiating presentation-format, maybe there is, in ‘hypothetic land,’ still room for an alternative. There’s two, perhaps three, spectrums of the market: large universities, which are big customers, but also filled with many individuals that have no cash; and organisations, of which some have too much cash and others have none. So, you could argue that a competing product should either be aimed at the lower part of the market, super-cheap & -basic, at the higher part of the market, super-expensive & -deluxe, or somewhere in the middle—a business-model that would find a way to spread a relatively complex application at a relatively affordable price.
I always think it’s the big stakeholders that should be considered first, in this case the universities and large organisations. Also, I think the ‘cheap and simple’ spectrum is getting pretty swamped and will not fulfil the objective of being different in the long-term.
Apart from that, I would be thinking about the limitations of the current product, and its current use cases, and try to find opportunities in both.
@Matt: my assignment yesterday was not to develop a new product, and my activity was 95% analysis and 5% coming up with a way to present that content in a memorable fashion. Even though I thought of some electronic ways to differentiate myself, I decided on a physical approach, using items & people from my environment, as that was most logical and feasible at that time. The organisation was pretty complex, but I wanted to make it a simple selling-proposition, which brought forward values like in-depth knowledge, diverse expertise, a customer-focussed approach, and a human face (as that was a value I identified and liked in many of the people I spoke to). So, I used stuffed animals, that were lying around everywhere, to tell a kind of Jungle Book story.
Sorry to not dazzle you with a complex electronic solution
…Or perhaps the answer is much more low-tech: better training for presenters. I.e. write a blog, publish a book, give presentations & consulting against pay, be presentation Zen!
Guys : if you really believe what you say to your clients, you really don’t need PowerPoint.
Give me a paperboard, and I’ll make you stand-up, applause, and sign up the purchase order right on the spot.
See what I mean ? The key issue is not the tool (PPT or else – Apple Keynote is the best for true eye-catching/jaw-dropping prezos, but GoogleDocs or Zoho do the job the Zen way perfectly well too). The key is your message. Your belief. Your vision. How YOU can help the customer solve HIS problem.
You don’t need a PC for that…
I agree with that Marc, and I guess Matt and Jeremy have been saying the same thing too. Maybe that was what the whole company-exercise was all about in the first place—too many people rely on electronic tools, while it’s really all about the presentation and the result.
But I think I’ll throw some more product/problem-brainstorms out here in Tech IT Easy in the future. Really enjoyed the process and the answers!
Yeah, I guess that was pretty much my point
But so many people rely on the powerpoint when
1) They don’t know what they’re talking about
2) They know it but don’t believe in it
3) They know it, believe in it but are just stressed as hell because of the audience and/or what’s at stake
I believe universities/schools are more and more eager to train students and have them do presentations quite often. But sometimes, it’s apparently not enough, and yeah, extra work is needed (speaking in public classes, etc. are getting more and more popular).
Vince, keep the brainstorms coming