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John Heilemann, in New York, has written a grand, sharp profile of Steve Jobs on the threshold of the iPhone release. One notable footnote to the piece is that — great as it is — it is forced to do a little tapdancing around the obvious fact that Jobs would not talk to Heilemann (or, at the very least, Heilemann did not interview Jobs for this piece, though he extracts key quotes from Jobs’ onstage talks at the recent D conference).
I may be a little hyper-aware of this because, almost a decade ago — as Jobs reassumed his post at the head of Apple — I, too, tried to write a definitive portrait of Jobs without having the chance to actually sit down and talk to him. Heilemann’s piece is, I think, the better of the two, and it’s also obviously a lot more timely. Nonetheless, mine still holds up pretty well.
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PowerPoint turns 20: Lee Gomes has a good column in the Wall Street Journal (free this week at this address, later on available for subscribers here) focusing on the creators of Powerpoint — their pride in providing the world with a popular tool, and their misgivings at how it is so often misused:
Mr. Gaskins reminds his questioner that a PowerPoint presentation was never supposed to be the entire proposal, just a quick summary of something longer and better thought out. He cites as an example his original business plan for the program: 53 densely argued pages long. The dozen or so slides that accompanied it were but the highlights.
Since then, he complains, “a lot of people in business have given up writing the documents. They just write the presentations, which are summaries without the detail, without the backup. A lot of people don’t like the intellectual rigor of actually doing the work.”
More at Robert Gaskins’ web site.
- Essential reading: Julian Dibbell’s fascinating and touching New York Times Magazine piece about Chinese gold farmers (workers who perform drudgework in game worlds to earn game money that can be resold for real-world cash).
- Also from the Times: in the wake of the “Sopranos” finale, Charles McGrath looks at the long tradition of in medias res endings, a topic in which I have an abiding personal interest.
[tags]steve jobs, john heilemann, lee gomes, powerpoint, robert gaskins, julian dibbell, chinese gold farming, charles mcgrath[/tags]
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