Google Presentations

First impressions of Google Presentations:

• Stripped-down. There's not much there there. Very modest selection of fonts, and only a few slide layouts.
• You can add images, move them around, and resize them, but absolutely nothing beyond that.
• A collection of slide "themes" is available, but I haven't yet seen a way that you could actually edit the themes, to make a custom "slide master".

If a large company (such as mine) were to eventually adopt a tool like this, I think the productivity (and usability) benefits would be substantial. Slide decks, as we know and love them today, suffer from the following problems:

• being emailed all over the place, and back again, despite the awkwardness of email attachments and our miniscule email storage budgets
• version confusion, due to having been emailed all over the place
• vulnerability to data loss due to living on peoples' laptops instead of "in the cloud"
• utter lack of access control (due to being emailed all over the place)
• an "orphaning" problem, where you have a deck that has lost its connection to its authors (or to any time and place at all).
• a lack of firm-wide consistency in layouts, styles, fonts, etc. Style compliance is voluntary, not built-in to the tool.
• sharing a presentation online, in real time, is accomplished only through complicated, expensive, and basically unpleasant 3rd-party tools like Centra and their ilk. In terms of sharing information and saving Accenture travel money, these kinds of presentations could be the mostly useful thing in the world; instead, they are something that people tend to avoid unless absolutely neceesary. I need an expense account (or a degree in computer science, or both) to show you my slides. Um, why IS that?

All these problems are dealt with -- or could be -- through a web-based approach to presentations. (Or through document-management systems, but history shows that that is just wishful thinking.) Just to take the last bullet point: instant online presentations. In Google Presentations, the first step is: click "start presentation". Second step: there's a URL in the corner; copy it and give it to someone (or many people). Third step: there is no third step.

There certainly may be online presentation apps that are richer than Google's, or more appropriate for the needs of the companies that actually run on PowerPoint (such as mine). I'm really more interested in the potential of this category than I am in Google's approach in itself. But I'll just note that the thing that's good about Google -- and bad about Microsoft or Centra or whomever -- is that they understand the virtue of simplicity. For instance, there a chat room built into the presentation view. But the entire chat room UI has exactly ONE BUTTON. To compare and contrast, do an images search for "centra".