Adobe’s PowerPoint killer ?

Billed as a collaborative slideware application Adobe Labs has launched Presentations.  Yet after building a series of prezos and testing the waters I must admit: I was expecting a lot more with Adobe’s online reputation.

At first glance you may ask is this Adobe’s PowerPoint Killer?  Actually the real competition is with SlideRocket, a strong online presentation tool that has been online for a couple of years and gathering high praise. Both Keynote and SlideRocket take a strong visual approach to authoring slide presentations.

Look at Photoshop.com to see how powerful visual tools can be migrated from the desktop to the internet.  In the end desktop competitors PowerPoint and Keynote along with online competitor SlideRocket are much more robust presentation tools.

Throw in Google’s presentation tool and Adobe’s product looks childish by comparison.  This is “Adobe” we are talking about: Photoshop, Illustrator and now Flash.  FYI: This tool is a flash-based online technology.  Adobe offers only eleven designs that look, well…by Adobe’s standards rather boring:

When you switch between themes you discover the number of  layouts to be limited to 6 or 8 per theme.  Not very flexible. At the same time there is no intuitive interface for simply linking content (photos or example) from Flickr.  Limiting indeed and really not thinking about the impact of social media.  Adobe bills this as “create stunning presentations with others online” but nothing could be further from the truth.

FWIW: Keynote provides 44 default themes, some include 20 different slide layouts.  With a wide audience the more visual options the better.  Keynote even supports HD themes.  Microsoft offers PowerPoint templates.  3rd Party slide vendors really offer PowerPoint and Keynote “power presenters” real, visually rich choices.  For example Keynotepro offers a 72 slide master theme.

One of the biggest problems for slideware websites including SlideShare is analytics.  Whether you like it or not, today we are all competing on analytics.  Sliderocket provides visitor traffic analytics for each presentation.  Not only is this lacking with Adobe Presentation its a bigger issue with branding any organization’s communication over the internet.  Maybe the most important issue overall.  If you have no way of knowing if anyone has watched your presentation … what is the point?

So what is best part?  With the shortcomings listed above the best part is the price.  Free.
But remember you get what you pay for.

The worst part is actually your internet connection.  Adobe’s sees this is a collaboration tool for building presentations with others.  When your internet connection is slow your workflow experience will be just as slow. Over cable (roadrunner download speed >6MB/s) my presentation playback was stalling.  I can only imagine its worse over DSL or a saturated connection at any business or school.  Try editing slides with co-workers in real-time over slow bandwidth? No Thanks.

You may want to consider a bandwidth upgrade as part of this product’s requirements.

Tags: adobe, network, Presentation, Slideware, PowerPoint, Keynote, Sliderocket, education, technology, trends