PowerPoint chief developer Dennis Austin dies – Kommersant

2023-09-09 05:41:35

The main developer of the PowerPoint presentation software, Dennis Austin, has died at the age of 76. His son Michael said The Washington Postthat the cause of death was lung cancer, which metastasized to the brain. Mr. Austin died at his home in California on September 1.

Presentation software was first released in 1987 under the name Presenter. Denis Austin worked on it with colleague Robert Gaskins at Forethought. Mr. Austin’s goal was to make the program easy to use. Presenter was originally intended for Macintosh computers. A few months after the program’s release, Microsoft bought Forethought for $14 million. By 1993, PowerPoint sales had exceeded $100 million, and PowerPoint later became part of the Office software package.

PowerPoint is now used to create more than 30 million presentations every day, Microsoft says. As The Washington Post notes, despite its widespread use, the program is often criticized for making presentations boring. Thus, Apple founder Steve Jobs and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos prohibited the use of PowerPoint in their companies.

Leonid Uvarchev