This interview originally appeared in the October 2003 issue
of Presentations magazine.
I wish to thank them for allowing me to mirror this content.
Richard Bretschneider (pictured to the left) is ten year
Microsoft veteran, having joined the company in 1993 to work on
PowerPoint IV for Windows and the Macintosh. Over the years, he's
contributed to the design and direction of the application, and
been awarded three PowerPoint related patents. Specific feature
area highlights include the first Microsoft Clip Art Gallery, AutoContent
Wizard, PowerPoint HTML export, PowerPoint Kiosk and Browse Modes,
Document Hyperlinks, Presentation Collaboration and Commenting,
and Password Protection. He was lead program manager for PowerPoint
2003, and is one of those currently directing planning for the
next version of the product. Prior to Microsoft, Richard worked
at Ashton-Tate and VisiCorp.
Geetesh:
Richard:
What do you think is the single most important feature
in this new release of PowerPoint?
You're going to expect me to say Package for CD, and that's
a fair choice if you just want to talk back of the box bullet
points. We like to think of performance as a feature as well.
Thanks to the Watson problem reporting system we've been
able to make great progress in the areas of fixing crashes
and stability problems, beyond just making sure the new features
we've added this release are solid and usable. Security and
sustained engineering are strong concerns for Microsoft and
Office and we put a lot of work into each of these this release.
On the more visible side, I'd reiterate that Package for
CD will change the way people distribute PowerPoint presentations.
Customers constantly related the fear that their presentation
was going to look different on the recipient's machine, and
that fear was justified. With Package for CD handling the
link fix-up, font embedding, and of course our new and very
high fidelity viewer we believe we've given users new confidence
in this area. I really think it's a great feature, one every
PowerPoint user can appreciate.
Geetesh:
Richard:
Can you tell us something about the MS Wish concept?
Also, how do you think it makes a difference?
MS Wish is a way for our customers to give us direct feedback
on how they use, or don't use, the product. Each wish is
read, recorded, and analyzed when it comes time for us to
update the products. It really is a tremendous aid to us
to hear directly from the users about how they see us improving
the value of our product.
Not only does MS Wish bring shortcomings and opportunities
for advancing or correcting our feature set to our attention,
MS Wish often gives us ammunition to fight for features we "wish" for
as well but can't justify doing based on our personal desires.
(No, we don't just push in features we want; we really do
have to make sure there is a significant audience out there
to justify the development cost and changes to the product.)
Tell us something about the new PowerPoint Viewer?
It's amazing how simple folks think the viewer must be.
It's just PowerPoint with a few features removed, right?
No, not really. We have to make sure it is manageable in
size, and works in all the scenarios. A big effort is made
to make sure the viewer works off non-writable media (CDs
for example) and requires no setup! That last bit means a
lot, because standard PowerPoint relies on tons of resources
that are installed along with Office. It's a tricky development
task. It's pretty amazing in the end, that you can just slip
this CD into a brand new PC with nothing but Windows on it
and you launch right into a full-fidelity presentation -
so seamless we're actually afraid people won't notice how
terrific that all is! Making it look simple is a big job,
and the Viewer team certainly rose to the occasion here.
Geetesh:
Richard:
This version of PowerPoint does not introduce many new
features apart from the Viewer - in fact some features
like the Meeting Minder and Send To Routing Recipient have
been removed. Why?
When a product gets past two or three releases you have
a lot of sustained engineering and scenario balancing tasks
to think about as you design the next version. It's not unheard
of to remove unused features or features that support scenarios
you've decided to service in a different manner, and if you
really take your microscope out you'll see that to some extent
almost every release. This release the development team was
working on adding collaborative services via SharePoint features
like Meeting's Workspaces and Document Libraries. Meeting
Minder and Send To Routing were features that we could either
shoe-horn into these new methods of working, or let stagnate
and add to clutter of the UI, or remove. Another factor here
is that we actually do review feature use after the products
ship. Some of our customers allow us to provide them with
special versions of the applications, and these give us back
usage data on the products. So we do have a handle on how
often a command is chosen, and even what commands were used "around" that
command. Meeting Minder and Document Routing were features
that just weren't used, and we had new and better solutions
for their scenarios, so we removed them.
Geetesh:
Richard:
Many users ask for a way to save presentations to a video format or saving
directly to DVD? Is Microsoft aware of this and what's being done
on this front?
You know we can't directly comment on new unannounced features,
and this is no exception. Saving to a video format is a very
popular feature on the Macintosh version of PowerPoint (which
is developed by friends of ours who share our building!)
It is a high runner on the Wish list, and we're very aware
of the utility of this type of export format. I think I have
to leave it at that.
