Easy is the main thing. Path of low resistance blablabla. In particular, word processors suck at placing images, and slides are extremely straightforward here. In my experiences, in companies that use alternative software (like Notion) folks are less likely to resort to slides, at least internally.
Does the slide deck thing also come from meetings having no shared memory? A doc assumes someone might sit alone with the argument; a deck assumes the argument has to be performed in the room.
It seems to me the information density per unit of text is superior to a memo? I can review a 20-page slide deck in approximately as many minutes and understand and retain a large amount of the important information. A 6-page memo will be filled with less important information per word, and I expect to retain less important information without careful review.
I have never really understood why slides are considered "less than" narrative prose, but it usually comes from people who don't understand the fundamentals of how to build a slide deck... also the same people who just generally don't know how to use software or work in a complex job.
Partly it's snobbishness and conventionalism. And partly it depends on the field. (Bad idea to replace category theory papers with slides.) But I do believe that the optimal way to communicate most ideas, if time is no object and you want maximum understanding, is a combination of narrative prose with lots of visualizations / figures / etc. Language is very powerful and woven deeply into us!
I'd argue that category theory papers skipped right over slides and went to YouTube essays and TikToks, as far as how the ideas are spread. maybe it's cos I'm in a consumer products ad town, but we used more dramatic storytelling conventions or pedagogy to build decks than anything related to how I'd write a prose narrative.
maybe this blog post coulda been a slide deck... : )
one curiosity not covered: people prefer graphics and multimedia, sure. Social media evolved from blogs (docs) to instagram (slides) to tiktok (vid). why is business stuck in the slides era? Why didn't Loom disrupt?
Maybe looms are still too hard to produce, particularly if you're a millennial or older who's not deeply comfortable with recording yourself.
and maybe THAT's where slides shine the most: it's very easy and forgiving to be kinda sloppy throwing a slide deck together. Most consumers look past layout, grammar, format inconsistencies in slides in ways they would excoriate on a doc or a video.
Writing a doc requires careful attention to detail — not quite for the Bezosian theory that people otherwise hide details, but perhaps still achieving the Bezosian benefit that the medium ensures not just that the consumer is more informed, but the producer is too.
Similarly, 10 times out of 10 I prefer a blog post to a podcast. Podcasts seem way easier to produce, but also way suceptible to offhand bullshitting
I think you're definitely right that it's easier (for many people) to make slides than to write a memo. Amazon is pretty open that it takes a while for people to adapt to their culture.
Anyway I generally prefer blogs to slides (because I like structured / orderly explanations?), but I VASTLY prefer either one of those to video. That's because slides and writing both allow you as a consumer of information to zoom around and skim at your own pace. One of the things I'm most looking forward to with AI is high quality video-to-blogpost converters. (I guess these surely exist already.)
What's interesting about blog posts vs podcasts is that I like podcasts, but I seem to prefer ones where the information density is lower than a (good) blog post. I suspect like podcasts kind of fill a different ecological niche than blog posts / slides / video for most people, in that they're something you listen to while you're doing something else.
I feel the same about podcasts. For me it’s less about the low information density and more about the parasociality—if I want info, I’ll read. But high info density podcasts are harder to listen to on the side, so maybe that plays into it too.
What if slides became popular, because they are more suited to the task? And Amazon is successful for other reasons.
Slides force their makers to clearly communicate important pieces of information in small coherent chunks. Is the information a business wants to communicate even well suited for a memo. This is not a detailed scientific paper, where processes are described in detail or chains of reasoning need to be explained. Often what is asked are a few pieces of information and the evidence for them, a PowerPoint is more suited for that then a Word document.
Some things I think may be at play (and you touched briefly on some of these but possibly were underemphaiszed in my view):
* Computers and software advanced. We can now just do complex visuals very quickly and easily. The web and other software grows in complexity at a speed that I'd guess matches RAM / CPU ability growth. A 10 year old computer is going to struggle a lot browsing the 2026 web, because the 2026 web has a ton of fancy stuff on it enabled by better computers. You say making slides by hand isn't that inferior, but I think that's probably not true and the difference in efficiency and ability to present data and visuals is very large.
* Overall this seems to me like just optimization / productivity growth? Your client is very busy, you want to show them you did excellent work for them, therefore the resulting thing needs to be extremely skimmable and give the results you promised in the minimal amount of time required, so that they'll pay you to do more of the same. If decks were banned tomorrow it wouldn't be a catastrophe, but maybe you'd see a small hit to productivity.
* "They learned that a 200 slide deck made clients feel like they got a lot for their money" is this a thing that actually happens? Maybe I'm just ignorant but that would cut strongly against my above point about optimization / productivity growth.
I hated slides, derided them as lowbrow. I rebelled in my industry and wrote white papers when others sent slides. Then I saw the light. Here’s what changed my mind:
1) Tufte’s books: Beautiful Evidence, Visual Explanations, Envisioning Information, and my favorite, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. They show how well a 2D multimedia format can convey ideas, forms, and structure. Extremely educational for communicating anything remotely technical, logistical, or process based. Dynomight: I’d really like your particular kind of take on these.
2) Screens got better. Slides on a VGA projector are clunky. Slides on a high-res canvas carry plenty of detail and often text is 12 or even 10 point. Much information can be contained in a single slide (Tufte also makes a point about information density).
3) Text got cheaper to make. Information got more abundant. There is efficiency in reading a concise presentation without the fluff. I hold the opposite of Bezos: long arguments are for persuading. Slides are for data.
4) Text got cheaper to make part 2: consumers of text got buried (and it’s only accelerated in the last few years). In my industry (we work with SBIR contracts), customers used to ask for 25 page proposals for ~$100k funding grants. They’d get hundreds of them. Now they as for a 5 page slide deck as a first round. Just the facts.
5) Word is terrible at combining text, imagery, and data in a way that connects related items. A format like Publisher may have fended off slides. Basically slides in portrait orientation. Maybe not, because screens are in landscape.
6) You can spot bad slides at a glance. Low information slides look bad (non functional cartoons, large bullets, silly animations). Low information text looks like all the other text; you have to read at least some of it to figure out if it’s any good. Ironically, I think this creates headwinds for slides as a reputable format; it’s easy to share and ridicule the bad ones.
7) Conversations favor slides. Text is unidirectional from the writer to the reader. Slides hold information related to an idea and support discussion.
My take you shall have! I am a big fan of information visualization. (Believe it or not, I had a copy of Visual Explanations next to my desk as I read your comment.) I used to often try to make nice visualizations to include with blog posts (e.g. https://dynomight.net/better-personalities/) but I've slowed down with that mostly because it's so damned time-consuming!
I think it's factually correct that (1) visualizations are good and (2) if you want to bash some visualizations and text together, presentation software is (somehow) the easiest way for most people to do it. I think these two facts explain quite a bit of the success of slides.
I'm not sure I'd go so far as to accept that slides are better than text. I guess we'd all agree that the best thing is to combine both. The best thing is surely to combine both. However, for issues that are truly complicated, I might defend text as more essential. For example: Imagine you want to understand the collapse of the USSR. I can imagine pure text that conveyed all the subtleties and theories (even if suboptimally). But I can't imagine any combination of bullet points and visualizations that would do it. Perhaps that's a failure of imagination!
I didn’t mean to argue that slides are better than text generally; only that they are better than document-format text for a large number of business-like uses. Increasing screen resolution allowing more text in the slide is the major reason I came to accept them as a primary tool.
I wholeheartedly agree with your counter example of history. I don’t think I’ve absorbed history much other than through text. It just takes some time and repetition from different angles to chew through enough input to *feel* like I understand a time and place. However, I’ve not watched, i.e. 10 hours of Ken Burns’ The Civil War; so I suppose it’s possible the effect is mainly from the time with the material, rather than format. Some of the longer history podcast authors are there, in terms of detailed treatment of a subject.
It does make me wonder what a compelling well-done historical 10 hour slide deck would look like. Perhaps there’s one out there. A subject that perhaps matches the strengths of slides might be Calume Douglas’s The Secret Horsepower Race. Roughly 50/50 highly technical imagery and text over ~500 pages. But the sofa-environment doesn’t match slides well at all. If he were to give a lecture, slides would accompany very well.
1) Slides legitimize bullet points. If people were okay with documents of bullet points, then maybe documents would be fine. Instead we live in a world where I'm converting my 1 bullet point email into a paragraph via ChatGPT, then at the other end ChatGPT converts my paragraph into 1 bullet point for my harried boss. At least I can save this wasted energy by sending a slide deck instead of a 6 page memo.
2) Slides are MUCH better designed for multimedia. Anyone who's tried formatting an engineering table in Word knows what I mean. And what is the deal with figure formatting in Word? God forbid I want to draw an arrow between these two diagrams...
Slides force the creator to express their main ideas in short clear phrases and to organize them into a logical order. In my experience the number of people who can do that well in prose is a much smaller set than those who can do it PowerPoint. Although those who can’t do it in either is admittedly the largest group.
I like slides as documents despite never setting foot near a consultant or a customer. During my studies, I found that making slides helped me distill my thoughts and construct a storyline. The limited space and the self-imoosed large font require putting a lot of thought into what goes onto a slide.
I also used slide decks from many university courses that are available online. I find the much more easier to extract information from than lecture notes.
Another big factor in my experience is that it's easier to integrate charts, diagrams, and images into slides. Having an unstructured canvas rather than a linear document eliminates a lot of formatting issues. PowerPoint is often the best general purpose tool to make simple diagrams too. So the software has some advantages for document creation that incentives the creators to use it, even if it isn't the best format for the reader.
Edward Tufte had a great criticism of PowerPoint brain from 2003: The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint
I had to check the comments. I can't believe that NOBODY did this for the humor value. :D
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1JC99oJDxy_mjNfJ9vgHugMoPLFYZJpqMg43vr-G2ykQ/edit?usp=sharing
10/10, we should A/B test this against the original post!
Everything is slides. Yay.
<3
Easy is the main thing. Path of low resistance blablabla. In particular, word processors suck at placing images, and slides are extremely straightforward here. In my experiences, in companies that use alternative software (like Notion) folks are less likely to resort to slides, at least internally.
Does the slide deck thing also come from meetings having no shared memory? A doc assumes someone might sit alone with the argument; a deck assumes the argument has to be performed in the room.
It seems to me the information density per unit of text is superior to a memo? I can review a 20-page slide deck in approximately as many minutes and understand and retain a large amount of the important information. A 6-page memo will be filled with less important information per word, and I expect to retain less important information without careful review.
Power corrupts but Powerpoint corrupts absolutely.
Edward Tufte's booklet is masterful:
https://www.edwardtufte.com/book/the-cognitive-style-of-powerpoint-pitching-out-corrupts-within-ebook/
I have never really understood why slides are considered "less than" narrative prose, but it usually comes from people who don't understand the fundamentals of how to build a slide deck... also the same people who just generally don't know how to use software or work in a complex job.
Partly it's snobbishness and conventionalism. And partly it depends on the field. (Bad idea to replace category theory papers with slides.) But I do believe that the optimal way to communicate most ideas, if time is no object and you want maximum understanding, is a combination of narrative prose with lots of visualizations / figures / etc. Language is very powerful and woven deeply into us!
Here's my related argument against using too much formatting in writing: https://dynomight.net/formatting/
I'd argue that category theory papers skipped right over slides and went to YouTube essays and TikToks, as far as how the ideas are spread. maybe it's cos I'm in a consumer products ad town, but we used more dramatic storytelling conventions or pedagogy to build decks than anything related to how I'd write a prose narrative.
maybe this blog post coulda been a slide deck... : )
one curiosity not covered: people prefer graphics and multimedia, sure. Social media evolved from blogs (docs) to instagram (slides) to tiktok (vid). why is business stuck in the slides era? Why didn't Loom disrupt?
Maybe looms are still too hard to produce, particularly if you're a millennial or older who's not deeply comfortable with recording yourself.
and maybe THAT's where slides shine the most: it's very easy and forgiving to be kinda sloppy throwing a slide deck together. Most consumers look past layout, grammar, format inconsistencies in slides in ways they would excoriate on a doc or a video.
Writing a doc requires careful attention to detail — not quite for the Bezosian theory that people otherwise hide details, but perhaps still achieving the Bezosian benefit that the medium ensures not just that the consumer is more informed, but the producer is too.
Similarly, 10 times out of 10 I prefer a blog post to a podcast. Podcasts seem way easier to produce, but also way suceptible to offhand bullshitting
I think you're definitely right that it's easier (for many people) to make slides than to write a memo. Amazon is pretty open that it takes a while for people to adapt to their culture.
Anyway I generally prefer blogs to slides (because I like structured / orderly explanations?), but I VASTLY prefer either one of those to video. That's because slides and writing both allow you as a consumer of information to zoom around and skim at your own pace. One of the things I'm most looking forward to with AI is high quality video-to-blogpost converters. (I guess these surely exist already.)
What's interesting about blog posts vs podcasts is that I like podcasts, but I seem to prefer ones where the information density is lower than a (good) blog post. I suspect like podcasts kind of fill a different ecological niche than blog posts / slides / video for most people, in that they're something you listen to while you're doing something else.
https://notegpt.io/youtube-transcript-generator for YouTube transcripts.
I feel the same about podcasts. For me it’s less about the low information density and more about the parasociality—if I want info, I’ll read. But high info density podcasts are harder to listen to on the side, so maybe that plays into it too.
What if slides became popular, because they are more suited to the task? And Amazon is successful for other reasons.
Slides force their makers to clearly communicate important pieces of information in small coherent chunks. Is the information a business wants to communicate even well suited for a memo. This is not a detailed scientific paper, where processes are described in detail or chains of reasoning need to be explained. Often what is asked are a few pieces of information and the evidence for them, a PowerPoint is more suited for that then a Word document.
Some things I think may be at play (and you touched briefly on some of these but possibly were underemphaiszed in my view):
* Computers and software advanced. We can now just do complex visuals very quickly and easily. The web and other software grows in complexity at a speed that I'd guess matches RAM / CPU ability growth. A 10 year old computer is going to struggle a lot browsing the 2026 web, because the 2026 web has a ton of fancy stuff on it enabled by better computers. You say making slides by hand isn't that inferior, but I think that's probably not true and the difference in efficiency and ability to present data and visuals is very large.
* Overall this seems to me like just optimization / productivity growth? Your client is very busy, you want to show them you did excellent work for them, therefore the resulting thing needs to be extremely skimmable and give the results you promised in the minimal amount of time required, so that they'll pay you to do more of the same. If decks were banned tomorrow it wouldn't be a catastrophe, but maybe you'd see a small hit to productivity.
* "They learned that a 200 slide deck made clients feel like they got a lot for their money" is this a thing that actually happens? Maybe I'm just ignorant but that would cut strongly against my above point about optimization / productivity growth.
I hated slides, derided them as lowbrow. I rebelled in my industry and wrote white papers when others sent slides. Then I saw the light. Here’s what changed my mind:
1) Tufte’s books: Beautiful Evidence, Visual Explanations, Envisioning Information, and my favorite, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. They show how well a 2D multimedia format can convey ideas, forms, and structure. Extremely educational for communicating anything remotely technical, logistical, or process based. Dynomight: I’d really like your particular kind of take on these.
2) Screens got better. Slides on a VGA projector are clunky. Slides on a high-res canvas carry plenty of detail and often text is 12 or even 10 point. Much information can be contained in a single slide (Tufte also makes a point about information density).
3) Text got cheaper to make. Information got more abundant. There is efficiency in reading a concise presentation without the fluff. I hold the opposite of Bezos: long arguments are for persuading. Slides are for data.
4) Text got cheaper to make part 2: consumers of text got buried (and it’s only accelerated in the last few years). In my industry (we work with SBIR contracts), customers used to ask for 25 page proposals for ~$100k funding grants. They’d get hundreds of them. Now they as for a 5 page slide deck as a first round. Just the facts.
5) Word is terrible at combining text, imagery, and data in a way that connects related items. A format like Publisher may have fended off slides. Basically slides in portrait orientation. Maybe not, because screens are in landscape.
6) You can spot bad slides at a glance. Low information slides look bad (non functional cartoons, large bullets, silly animations). Low information text looks like all the other text; you have to read at least some of it to figure out if it’s any good. Ironically, I think this creates headwinds for slides as a reputable format; it’s easy to share and ridicule the bad ones.
7) Conversations favor slides. Text is unidirectional from the writer to the reader. Slides hold information related to an idea and support discussion.
My take you shall have! I am a big fan of information visualization. (Believe it or not, I had a copy of Visual Explanations next to my desk as I read your comment.) I used to often try to make nice visualizations to include with blog posts (e.g. https://dynomight.net/better-personalities/) but I've slowed down with that mostly because it's so damned time-consuming!
I think it's factually correct that (1) visualizations are good and (2) if you want to bash some visualizations and text together, presentation software is (somehow) the easiest way for most people to do it. I think these two facts explain quite a bit of the success of slides.
I'm not sure I'd go so far as to accept that slides are better than text. I guess we'd all agree that the best thing is to combine both. The best thing is surely to combine both. However, for issues that are truly complicated, I might defend text as more essential. For example: Imagine you want to understand the collapse of the USSR. I can imagine pure text that conveyed all the subtleties and theories (even if suboptimally). But I can't imagine any combination of bullet points and visualizations that would do it. Perhaps that's a failure of imagination!
I didn’t mean to argue that slides are better than text generally; only that they are better than document-format text for a large number of business-like uses. Increasing screen resolution allowing more text in the slide is the major reason I came to accept them as a primary tool.
I wholeheartedly agree with your counter example of history. I don’t think I’ve absorbed history much other than through text. It just takes some time and repetition from different angles to chew through enough input to *feel* like I understand a time and place. However, I’ve not watched, i.e. 10 hours of Ken Burns’ The Civil War; so I suppose it’s possible the effect is mainly from the time with the material, rather than format. Some of the longer history podcast authors are there, in terms of detailed treatment of a subject.
It does make me wonder what a compelling well-done historical 10 hour slide deck would look like. Perhaps there’s one out there. A subject that perhaps matches the strengths of slides might be Calume Douglas’s The Secret Horsepower Race. Roughly 50/50 highly technical imagery and text over ~500 pages. But the sofa-environment doesn’t match slides well at all. If he were to give a lecture, slides would accompany very well.
Slides allocate fixed attention windows to variable amounts of text, effectively setting up equivalent importance ratios between them.
1) Slides legitimize bullet points. If people were okay with documents of bullet points, then maybe documents would be fine. Instead we live in a world where I'm converting my 1 bullet point email into a paragraph via ChatGPT, then at the other end ChatGPT converts my paragraph into 1 bullet point for my harried boss. At least I can save this wasted energy by sending a slide deck instead of a 6 page memo.
2) Slides are MUCH better designed for multimedia. Anyone who's tried formatting an engineering table in Word knows what I mean. And what is the deal with figure formatting in Word? God forbid I want to draw an arrow between these two diagrams...
Slides force the creator to express their main ideas in short clear phrases and to organize them into a logical order. In my experience the number of people who can do that well in prose is a much smaller set than those who can do it PowerPoint. Although those who can’t do it in either is admittedly the largest group.
I like slides as documents despite never setting foot near a consultant or a customer. During my studies, I found that making slides helped me distill my thoughts and construct a storyline. The limited space and the self-imoosed large font require putting a lot of thought into what goes onto a slide.
I also used slide decks from many university courses that are available online. I find the much more easier to extract information from than lecture notes.
In conclusion, good slides are good.
Another big factor in my experience is that it's easier to integrate charts, diagrams, and images into slides. Having an unstructured canvas rather than a linear document eliminates a lot of formatting issues. PowerPoint is often the best general purpose tool to make simple diagrams too. So the software has some advantages for document creation that incentives the creators to use it, even if it isn't the best format for the reader.
Edward Tufte had a great criticism of PowerPoint brain from 2003: The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint
https://diverdi.colostate.edu/all_courses/%20oral%20presentations%20-%20communication%20and%20style/cognitive_style_of_powerpoint_tufte.pdf
AI will destroy the proof of thought from memos at Amazon. Not sure how to culturally maintain something alike.