The Education of Bill Gates

I finally saw Social Network over the Holiday break and took special note of a scene in which Bill Gates returns to Harvard to deliver a talk to an audience that includes Mark Zuckerberg—”the next Bill Gates.” It reminded me that in my seminar on presentation design, I come down pretty hard on Bill Gates as a presenter. The theme of my seminar is creating a contemporary and new style of presentation, not dated-looking “PowerPoints.” And just as I use Steve Jobs as an exemplar of good presenting and design, I use Bill Gates often as an example of bad, dated presentation design.

The problem is that my Bill Gates examples are largely 5-15 years old. Are my comparisons fair…?

You see, Bill Gates used to deliver some horrendous looking and ineffective “PowerPoints” while running Microsoft. His slides often looked like this.

The list of sins is lengthy: Jargon, little negative space, decoration instead of communication, poor use of imagery, death by bullet points, etc.

But is condemning Gates for these slides like condemning me for wearing parachute pants in high school? (No emails on this, please.)

So, I decided to take another look at what Gates has been up to lately with regard to presentation. I watched again his last two TED talks: the 2009 Malaria presentation and the2010 Energy Innovating to Zero talk. The 2009 talk is (in)famous in that Gates created a coup de presentation in releasing a jarful of mosquitos in the auditorium. That’s what people remember, and he should be lauded for creating such a memorable moment (that garnered great press). But watching the talk again, I saw too much old thinking on the screen. These are some of the slides from 2009…

While there is progress for Gates here (some full-screen imagery, one message per slide), the presentation suffers from chart junk, unclear data messaging and tiny type. The mosquitos rocked; the slides did not. They barely looked designed. Not that everyone should need a presentation designer, but you think Gates might have afforded himself the luxury…

But then I watched the 2010 talk which included slides such as these:

It seems that in the span of a single year, Bill Gates found religion. His 2010 slides are downright gorgeous. They’re simple, elegant, well-designed graphically and above all: clear. They tell a visual story instead of obfuscating it. This time, Gates’ memorable moment (“releasing” fire flies) was kind of a dud. But his slides kicked ass.

Bill has got a lot of catching up to do, but I’m glad to see that he has turned a corner.

So, will I continue making fun of him? Yes. Until he calls over to Redmond and makes the PowerPoint team fix the page numbering glitches…