PowerPoint bullets make us stupid, but Steve Jobs and Guy Kawasaki are using it

Edward Tufte , the author of "Envisioning Information", "Visual Display of Quantitative Information", "Visual Explanations" and other books, believes that PowerPoint is Evil. He said, adopting Lord Acton's dictum, "Power corrupts, PowerPoint corrupts absolutely." However, people say that Steve Jobs and Guy Kawasaki, two great communicators, used PowerPoint in what is generally considered best practices of PowerPoint.

What are we ordinary people going to do with PowerPoint, stop using it, or try to imitate Steve Jobs and Guy Kawasaki? This question is definitely relevant as PowerPoint is the workhorse used by millions from schools to corporations and governments.

Edward Tufte.
Edward Tufte, further said, "It induced stupidity, turned everyone into bores, wasted time, and degraded the quality and credibility of communication".

He has only harsh words for it, "pushy style seeks to set up a speaker's dominance over the audience", "no respect for the audience", teaching kids bad cognitive style :"rather than learning to write a report using sentences, children are being taught how to formulate client pitches and infomercials", "slideware often reduces the analytical quality of presentations. In particular, the popular PowerPoint templates (ready-made designs) usually weaken verbal and spatial reasoning, and almost always corrupt statistical analysis", and "the PowerPoint style routinely disrupts, dominates, and trivializes content".
At the end of the Wired article, he concluded, "The practical conclusions are clear. PowerPoint is a competent slide manager and projector. But rather than supplementing a presentation, it has become a substitute for it."
To read more on this, see Aaron Swartz, "PowerPoint Remix," , presented in PowerPoint style, titled "Edward R. Tufte’s “The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint”, Presented in the Form of a PowerPoint Presentation."

Lots of pictures, few words, in large font.
Steve Jobs style is lots of pictures, few words in extremely large font. Steve wants people to listen to him, not to read the slides. Just as important, the speaker should also listen to what he/she is saying, and not guided by the slides as a robot. Guy Kawasaki said the font should be at least size 30 Arial.

10/20/30 mantra.
Guy Kawasaki's mantra is: no more than 10 slides, not more than 20 minutes, and size 30 font.
Microsoft's Don Box went further, at the start of his presentation, he deleted POWERPNT.EXE and opened Notepad.

In "Guy Kawasaki: Presenter extraordinaire" , he is said to take a Zen approach of simplicity, limiting to only 10 points, presented in 10 slides .
The article "What is good PowerPoint design? " talked more about Zen and simplification:
"In Living Zen, author Robert Linsen (in speaking on the simplification of needs in everyday life) says that a "simplification of existence" is a consequence of an "effective experience of Zen." In other words, as one discovers their true nature, "needs" such as possessions or status are reduced or seen for what they are: superfluous."

In summary, we can say that Powerpoints should be simple with few points, not distracting both to the audience and the speaker, and we should be careful not to follow the bullets cognitive style. There is no substitute for clear thinking, communication, and practice, don't expect them to come from PowerPoint.