It is a passion or a nightmare, depending on professional and personal desires: the PowerPoint software lost one of its co-creators, Dennis Austin, who died on September 1 from cancer, reports the Washington Post. She was 76 years old. Along with his friend Robert Gaskins, Austin was involved in much of the design of the presentation software.
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Both had worked on PowerPoint since 1985, under the working name Presenter. Version 1.0 of PowerPoint was finally released in April 1987, exclusively… on Mac. A few weeks later, in July 1987, Microsoft finally bought the company from Dennis Austin and Robert Gaskins, before releasing the first version of PowerPoint for Windows. in 1990.
As you remember Washington Post, Dennis Austin continued to work on PowerPoint development until 1996, when he retired. He died just days after John Warnock, co-founder of Adobe, also known for developing the PDF format.
Available within Microsoft’s Office suite, PowerPoint is the subject of heated debates about the relevance of its use. While it remains one of the most popular professional software in the world, several big bosses such as Steve Jobs or Jeff Bezos have strongly opposed its use, which, in their opinion, restricts the creativity and efficiency of employees.
With the arrival of artificial intelligence, Microsoft hopes to radically transform the tool. To avoid long hours of design, the company developed artificial intelligence that allows users to generate a PowerPoint presentation, based on a request in the form of a simple sentence. This development should be available in the coming months.
Source: BFM TV
