NASA partially blames Power Point for space shuttle crash

From the NY Times (brought to my attention by esteemed colleague Adam Carter earlier today): “... the Columbia Accident Investigation Board at NASA released Volume 1 of its report on why the space shuttle crashed. As expected, the ship's foam insulation was the main cause of the disaster. But the board also fingered another unusual culprit: PowerPoint, Microsoft's well-known ''slideware'' program. “

Apparently NASA uses Power Point too much. I know the feeling. How many times have I sat through internal meetings at Microsoft where a “presenter” simply reads from a Power Point deck for an hour? I've often argued that a better use of everybody's time would be to send the ppt out earlier (although NOT by email of course - posting it up to a Windows Sharepoint teamsite is much better for your bandwidth) for the audience to read and then use the time together to discuss the content as opposed to 'death by power point'.