In this episode, Ian and Ash embark on a thoroughly British adventure through the land of presentation software, complete with the obligatory post-implementation complaining. Marvel as Ian delivers a monumental discourse on PowerPoint crimes, Keynote superiority, and why Comic Sans should be punishable by “a damn good encouragement.”

Meanwhile, Ash provides a heartfelt eulogy for Skype, Microsoft’s once-beloved communication tool that’s being put out to digital pasture this May, only to be replaced by its demonstrably worse offspring, Teams.

Between passionate debates about slide etiquette and whether “post-amble” should be a real word, our intrepid hosts ponder why big companies buy innovative tools only to slowly suffocate them, contemplate the future of VR meetings with battery life measured in minutes, and propose a spin-off podcast called “Terrible Product-Type Meetings.” All delivered with the quintessential British approach of having an idea, implementing it, and then complaining about it afterwards – just as nature intended.

Links

• Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds
• Rethinking the Presentation: Ian’s presentation opus astonishingly preserved on Slideshare from 2009.
• Apple’s Keynote and Microsoft’s Powerpoint. Oh and Google Slides.
• Fonts: Arial and, er… Comic Sans
• Sir Ken Robinson’s iconic TED talk: Do schools kill creativity?
• Toastmasters
• The Thick of It (watch on iPlayer) and In The Loop, both by Armando Iannucci, and featuring Peter Capaldi as Malcolm Tucker
• Difficult difficult lemon difficult.
• The Register: Non-biz Skype kicks the bucket on May 5
• BBC: Microsoft announces Skype will close in May
• Weekend Testing
• Microsoft with the world’s highest cookie consent form to press release size ratio: The next chapter: Moving from Skype to Microsoft Teams
• The Team Guide to Software Testability by Rob Meaney and our very own Ash Winter
• Meta’s Horizon Workrooms Virtual Office and Meetings and Ian’s VR experiments in using it with Dan Hammond
• Lawyer cat filter mishap