Why PowerPoint will be replaced by Wikis

PowerPoint is a great tool for making presentations or presenting a team’s final output, or recommendation. But what about situations where a deliverable is a living, breathing document?

At Columbia Business School we’re constantly working on teams to complete projects with long time horizons. Powerpoint and Word, unaided by Microsoft’s expensive and arcane collaboration software, are terrible for team collaboration. This software proves even less useful when a team is charged with producing collective research rather than a collective deliverable.

Enter Wikis and cloud computing. It’s not news that cloud computing is facilitating team collaboration at an impressive rate. What I’ve learned in business school, however, is how powerful these resources are for harnessing collective brainpower, and what roadblocks exist that might prevent them from taking more share from Microsoft Office.

• A wiki is a powerful tool for team collaboration because:
• Users can enter the document and change it at their leisure
• Users can be notified in real time when changes have occurred
• With reach features such as folders and tags, and search Wikis scale very easily from the basic to the complex
• New users can ramp up very easily by sifting through Wiki content, rather than sniffing around the office for content that’s stored on local hard drives

There are, of course, a number of challenges:

• Control and responsibility are disintermediated in a wiki environment. It’s hard to point fingers on a Wiki. Documents can be edited, added, or deleted without anyone having a final say
• Security is hard to control in a Wiki. Corporate shared drives are typically protected by security shields which make it exceedingly difficult to accessing content without authorization. Wikis are typically protected by a password that is shared among many users, all but guaranteeing the possibility of a security breach.
• Training is a must, and most people have the bandwidth to understand only one “Office”-like product. Microsoft’s key advantage, in my opinion, was that Office became ubiquitous so early-on in history of personal computing. Learning this software (especially at a professional level) is not a trivial endeavor. As a result, switching costs to competing products are high, which makes the Office Suite extremely sticky.

So far, no single wiki platform has achieved sufficient dominance to make it sufficiently worthwhile for professionals to learn as a rule. Organizations, such as Columbia, should pick a specific Wiki platform to support, and encourage users to jump on it. With that organizational innovation, I believe we’d start chipping away at Microsoft Office’s dominance and perhaps even see the end of PowerPoint.