PowerPoint turned 30 in 2017, and to measure its popularity, Microsoft commissioned a poll among users of social media (Snapchat and Instagram). To Microsoft’s surprise, they found that 80% of Millennial respondents considered PowerPoint to be a “great tool.” The popularity of PowerPoint is attributed to the fact that Millennials learned PPT in school.
PowerPoint was initially built with black and white headers.
PPT became available in 1987, whereas Millennials started schools or were age 5 over the years 1988-2004. It proved to be an excellent tool for teachers who were already using A4 size papers to create such slides for their students.
A second significant factor is a change in the kinds of documents used routinely in businesses, in government offices, in the military, and just about everywhere else. At the time PowerPoint was created, there was a lot of “long-form” writing—that is, documents of many pages arranged logically into sections and sub-sections, with connected paragraphs and full sentences. Over the years, the trend has decreased tremendously. This is often connected to a supposed decline in the attention spans of people over the years. However, there is some resistance to this change. In the U.S. military, there has been a backlash against PowerPoint presentations to replace fully-written briefing papers.
Lastly, what helped PowerPoint stay in the market for so long is its adaptability. The “style” of PowerPoint was only superficial, not limited by the product’s underlying architecture, and could be changed by any individual user. PowerPoint managed to offer both abilities through a rich system of defaults. Every design element had a default for every property that should produce a beautiful presentation (in a current style for business presentations). Still, every property could also be edited freely. PowerPoint has proven malleable enough to accommodate these different changes because individual users can make whatever use of it that they want. If PowerPoint had been designed to narrowly restrict its output, it might well not have survived so long and in so many ecological niches.