PowerPoint has aged well

Microsoft PowerPoint has been around for quite some time and has been the reigning presentation software for a quarter of century. The first version (originally called Presenter, later renamed because of copyright issues) was developed in the late 80s for Macintosh computers by the defunct american company Forethought. In 1990, Microsoft purchased the company and released the first Microsoft PowerPoint in 1990 along Windows 3.0.
Many versions have seen the light in these two centuries and the latest is Microsoft PowerPoint 2010 for Windows and 2011 for Mac. The former one is the one I have been working with recently.

We could argue that PowerPoint's fiercest competitor at the moment is Prezi, an online presentation-based-on-poster software, as I call it. It has been developed by Rumanian architect and visual artist Adam Somlai-Fischer and launched for public use in 2009. The main difference with PowerPoint is that its main tool for presentation is the ability to zoom in and out inside a canvas, a big-as-you-need canvas.

From a bird's view it could be said that these too completely different programs can serve the same purpose but I think that each of them is best applied to different aims. Prezi is more of a storyteller, because even though it may not seem so at first, Prezi is almost completely linear. We can create a sense of movement and develop a whole story, a topic, a journal, a chronicle by using text, images, videos (warning sing here!: videos can only be played if the computer is connected to the Internet) and music (warning here too!: Prezi is only able to attach a limited number of audio formats and to the best of my knowledge .mp3 files are not supported yet. On the other hand, PowerPoint has incorporated since the late 90s, VBA programming features with an easy-to-use interface that does not demand the user to know the syntax of the language and is highly automatised. This allows us to jump from one slide to the other creating hyperlinks and navigating the presentation as an interactive set of slides. The latest Windows versions (2007 and 2010) have mainly added visual effects and a new layout that facilitates the creation of eye-catching and visually attractive projects. In my opinion this software, that has been included in every Microsoft Office package, is best used when we need to deliver oral presentations, especially those that need to be backed with images, videos as for example the relatively new presentation methodology PechaKucha.