Dennis Austin, 76, PowerPoint developer
Dennis Austin, who played a seminal role in shaping how information is communicated in modern society as the principal software developer of PowerPoint, the ubiquitous and occasionally scorned program employed by office workers, teachers, and bureaucrats, died Sept. 1 at his home in Los Altos, Calif. He was 76.
The cause was lung cancer that metastasized to the brain, said his son, Michael Austin.
Released in 1987 by Forethought, a small software firm, PowerPoint was the digital successor to overhead projectors, transforming the labor-intensive process of creating slides — a task typically assigned to design departments or outsourced — to one where any employee with a computer could point, click, and rearrange information with a mouse.
‘‘Our users were familiar with computers, but probably not graphics software,’’ Mr. Austin wrote in an unpublished history of the software’s development. ‘‘They were highly motivated to look their best in front of others, but they weren’t savvy in graphics design.’’
Working alongside Robert Gaskins, the Forethought executive who conceived the software, it was Mr. Austin’s job as the software engineer to make PowerPoint (originally called Presenter) easy to operate. He accomplished this with a ‘‘directmanipulation interface,’’ he wrote, meaning that ‘‘what you are editing looks exactly like the final product.’’
Originally targeted for Macintosh computers, which had a graphical interface, Presenter included ways for users to incorporate graphics, clip art, and multiple fonts. In addition, the slides could be uniform with graphic borders, corporate logos, and slide numbers. The goal, Mr. Austin wrote, was ‘‘to create presentations — not simply slides.’’
In his book ‘‘Sweating Bullets: Notes about Inventing PowerPoint’’ (2012), Gaskin wrote that ‘‘Dennis came up with at least half of the major design ideas,’’ and was ‘‘completely responsible for the fluid performance and the polished finish of the implementation.’’
‘‘It’s a good bet,’’ Gaskin added, ‘‘that if Dennis had not been the person designing PowerPoint, no one would ever have heard of it.’’
A few months after PowerPoint debuted, Microsoft bought Forethought for $14 million in its first major acquisition. By 1993, PowerPoint was generating more than $100 million in sales. Microsoft eventually added PowerPoint to its emerging suite of Office programs, including Word.
PowerPoint is now used to create more than 30 million presentations a day, the company says. But on its path to workplace dominance, the software has been derided by corporate executives, business school professors, and military generals for dumbing down presentations into a mind-numbing morass of interminable bullet points.
‘‘I hate the way people use slide presentations instead of thinking,’’ Apple’s Steve Jobs said in Walter Isaacson’s 2011 biography. ‘‘People would confront a problem by creating a presentation. I wanted them to engage, to hash things out at the table, rather than show a bunch of slides. People who know what they’re talking about don’t need PowerPoint.’’
He banned the software. So did Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
Mr. Austin and Gaskin acknowledged the complaints, but thought they were unfairly aimed at the software and not the people who were using it to make lazy, poor presentations.
‘‘It’s just like the printing press,’’ Mr. Austin told The Wall Street Journal in 2007. ‘‘It enabled all sorts of garbage to be printed.’’
PowerPoint’s ubiquity and especially its facility in creating tedious, unending presentations made it the rare piece of software to cross over into the cultural lexicon.
The program has been satirized on ‘‘Saturday Night Live,’’ in Dilbert comic strips and by New Yorker magazine cartoonists, including Alex Gregory, whose drawing of an executive devil interviewing another devil is captioned, ‘‘I need someone well versed in the art of torture do you know PowerPoint?’’
Dennis Robert Austin was born in Pittsburgh on May 28, 1947, and grew up in the suburb of Rosslyn Farms. His father ran an association for executives, and his mother was a typist and later a homemaker.
He studied engineering at the University of Virginia. While there, he worked with a roomsized computer protected by glass. Students wrote programs on a machine that generated punch cards that were then fed into the computer by specially trained computer operators. The programs ran all night, and students returned the next day to see the output.
Eventually, Mr. Austin befriended the operators, who allowed him behind the glass at night to work directly with the machine.
After graduating in 1969, he did graduate work at Arizona State University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California at Santa Barbara.
Mr. Austin married Janet Ann Kilgore in 1972. In addition to his wife and son, survivors include a granddaughter and brother.