Dennis Austin co-creator of PowerPoint is dead at 76

Dennis Austin, the co-creator of PowerPoint, has passed away at the age of 76 due to lung cancer at his home in Los Altos, California . Austin was instrumental in the development of PowerPoint, which revolutionized the way presentations are made.

Under Austin’s leadership as the primary developer of PowerPoint from 1985 to 1996, the software’s popularity soared. By 1993, PowerPoint was generating over $100 million in sales. Microsoft integrated PowerPoint into its suite of Office products, including Word, further solidifying its place as the go-to presentation software.

Austin studied engineering at several universities, including MIT and UC Santa Barbara, before going to work as a software developer, eventually joining the software company Forethought and co-developing PowerPoint. The company released the software in 1987, and Microsoft bought the company just a few months later.

The Washington Post notes that Robert Gaskins, PowerPoint’s other co-creator, wrote in his book Sweating Bullets: Notes about Inventing PowerPoint that Austin “came up with at least half of the major design ideas” and added that if he hadn’t been designing the software, “no one would ever have heard of it.”

Despite its 36-year history as the most ubiquitous software for presentations, PowerPoint has its detractors; Jeff Bezos once said that “we outlawed PowerPoint presentations at Amazon,” calling the move “probably the smartest thing we ever did.” Steve Jobs was quoted in Walter Isaacson’s Jobs biography as saying, “People who know what they’re talking about don’t need PowerPoint.”

The software remains a key part of Microsoft’s suite of office tools to this day. Recently, the company has begun adding AI tooling to PowerPoint using Copilot, a sort of modern-day Clippy AI assistant for Microsoft 365. It can be prompted to create presentations or to generate images and adjust the tone or format of text within a presentation.