I’ll post some more general thoughts about Tufte elsewhere but I just wanted to take you up on a couple of points.

Firstly I just wanted to contend your first “key driver”, or real world constraint. It strikes me that “Time is Limited” is something of a non-sequitur. You might as well say that the universe is finite, or cite the laws of thermodynamics, or the inevitable heat-death of the sun. Of course time is limited, the problem is that the time allocated to a given task is often less than is required. This is of course not a universal constraint, and hence not a suitable axiom for your argument.

Considering the Columbia incident, obviously there was a hard time constraint for making a decision. Tufte’s example slide was written with the Shuttle due to return from orbit in 14 days. The decision needed to be the right one, based on the right analysis.

I think Tufte is asking: why did they waste time at all with a PowerPoint? The analysis needs to be documented in a technical report — and I think you concede this point that PowerPoint should not replace other forms of documentation — so why bother wasting time trying to cram the details into a sequence of slides averaging 97 words each? Important facts are likely to get lost. And in this case they were.

To be sure a good craftsman does not blame his tools, but Tufte makes it pretty clear that that the facts were lost in the transition from supporting emails to PowerPoint. The tool, and the style of presentation encouraged by the tool, contributed to this loss.

This seems to me to be a reasonable argument against the use of PowerPoint when time is limited.

In response to some of your other niggles:

In the Gerstner example, I believe Tufte is illustrating a cognitive style that has now come to be synonymous with PowerPoint, and that cognitive style is the topic of the essay, hence it is certainly relevant.

On form vs. content: You say that the quality of a slide deck is correlated to the amount of time spent on it. Do you have a reference for this? Frankly I find it unbelievable in general. The quality of a given presentation seems to be more correlated with the skill of the presenter, and more importantly the quality of the information being presented. I’m not sure how this relates to the quality of a slide deck, but elsewhere you seem to be saying that your managers are easily distracted by shiny baubles and trinkets. It is unclear to me what relevance this has to the discussion of PowerPoint as a tool for serious communications.

On the “genetic fallacy”, I believe Tufte is referring to Conway’s How Do Committees Invent?. Worth a read, although admittedly I find the connection to PowerPoint a bit tenuous.

I have more to say here, but that’s probably enough for now.

Anyway, a lot of what you say is correct, but there’s something about using slides not in a presentation that I think you’ve skipped a little. You mentioned that managers are more likely to read PPT files instead of .docs. I think this is a really bad thing, because presentations are primarily supposed to be presented. I agree with you that sometimes things need to be oversimplified, and the presenter needs to “soften” the statement, but then you can’t just read the slides, you need a document instead.

The biggest problem with PP (or other slideware) is that the slides often get handed out, unchanged. Many statements get qualified by the presenter but are left retarded in the slide, and to make things worse the terse writing style makes reading harder. I’ve had this problem often at uni, where lecturers would give out copies of their slides instead of proper notes.

The other bad thing is that printing out a slide is a terrible waste of space. Even printing slides 8-up would leave a large amount of white on the page. I don’t see how a manager would choose a powerpoint over a document.

I don’t know if Tufte is responding to the parlor sport, but he has issued a second edition of the booklet.