Apple's Keynote software Better than Microsoft Powerpoint

Over the years, the software has been blamed for boring people senseless. The phrase "Death by PowerPoint" is common corporate parlance. Some companies and conference organizers have prohibited PowerPoint, and the press perennially skewers it as a thought-free plague. One legal scholar, tongue-in-cheek, proposed a constitutional amendment banning its use

Why do I say this? Because I did good number of presentations using PowerPoint and always dreaded the experience of creating the slides. And Keynote removes that dread and makes us look better because it:

* Renders slides for maximum impact. The whole idea behind slides is that they should be visual aids to the presentation, not the presentation itself. With your eyes providing the highest bandwidth path to your brain, those visuals make a huge impression on the audience. PowerPoint slides tend to look pixelated and blocky when blown up to full screen, and the animations tend to stutter or jerk. Keynote slides boast fully anti-aliased typography to remove jaggies, and the animations render smoothly. Most audience members couldn't tell you why Keynote slides look more professional, but they will tell you they like them better.
* Makes it easy to do common things. One of the most common activities for a presenter is to step through a table or graph one element at a time. Yet, because PowerPoint builds its tables in Word and its graphs in Excel, it's nearly impossible to display a table one column at a time or build a graph one element at a time. Both of those functions are built into Keynote because good presenters don't want to overload their audiences with too much information at once.
* Avoids needless clutter. Even when the presenter is creating the slides, PowerPoint tends to clutter the screen with a zillion Office buttons and menubars. And most PowerPoint color themes and templates tend to pull focus to the template, not to the content. Apple's built-in Keynote templates offer minimalist alternatives (such as the black gradient background that has become a hallmark of Steve Jobs keynote speeches) that allow the content to shine. And Keynote has a single menu bar and devotes most of the screen to the slides, encouraging the presenter to focus on making the slide great.
* Helps presenters present well. One of the most important techniques for a presenter is to be able to introduce the next slide before they click to it. Using PowerPoint, that's a technique that requires a second computer and display. Keynote on a Powerbook or Macbook Pro puts your preview slide on your laptop (along with your notes, if you like) while your current slide is up on the screen. Just this one feature allows most presenters to focus more on what they are saying rather than trying to remember what comes next -- and thereby makes them more compelling.

I am not the first people to observe the Keynote effect. Les Posen at Cyberpsych has a terrific blog article titled, Just what is it about Keynote that is changing the way people present? where he cites a number of famous presenters who have been won over to Keynote because it allows them to be more creative. And of course, Al Gore did the visuals for his groundbreaking film, An Inconvenient Truth in Keynote. And Garr Reynolds at the site PresentationZen.com notes how the Zen esthetic embodied in Keynote allows Steve Jobs' presentations to have much more power and impact than similar presentations by Bill Gates.
The bottom line: Good marketing demands good presentations. No professional marketer would publish a print ad in Microsoft Word because the quality would be too poor to be taken seriously, yet the CEOs of their companies continue to do presentations the way they have for the last two decades. If major newspapers are going to bemoan the tragedy of corporate presentations today, perhaps they should start noting that there are alternatives to death by PowerPoint.

Dell Losing PC Market Share - Improving On Margins

Six months ago, then global PC market share leader Dell, Inc., was taking a beating from Wall Street sell-side analysts for its declining margins and profits. As a result, shares traded for as low as $19 - a five-year low. Since share prices bottomed in July, they are up more than 20%. The reason: Dell is now focusing on profits as opposed to gaining market share. And while the company has fallen out of 1st place in global PC market share - replaced by rival Hewlett-Packard - the company's margins have started climbing again, as has the average price-per-unit of PC sales. Analysts have taken note and several have recently upgraded the stock's rating. Last week, UBS upgraded Dell to "neutral" from the equivalent of a sell rating, and upped its 12-month target price. Goldman Sachs also removed Dell from its list of sell targets and upgraded it to neutral, due to more disciplined product pricing at the company. While some skeptics remain, the overall tide seems to be turning favorably for Dell.

Apple Set To Release iPhone

Apple has signed with contract manufacturer Hon Hai to make 12 million iPhones next year. Given that this is a product untested in the market (if it's true), it would certainly demonstrate how serious Apple is in attacking the phone market.
One of the rather interesting marketing aspects I've read about is the idea that the iPhone won't be tied to any specific carrier. Instead, it will be sold "unlocked," requiring you to insert a GSM subscriber identity [SIM] card. The downside: Apple won't get any subsidies or special deals from working with the likes of Cingular or T-Mobile. The upside: such an approach opens up most of the world as the target market instead of just the US. This approach would prove that Apple is thinking globally with its next product segment -- and that phone market could bring literally hundreds of millions of new prospects to Apple.