<P> "PowerPoint makes us stupid," Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps, the Joint Forces commander, said this month at a military conference in North Carolina . (He spoke without PowerPoint .) Brig. Gen. H.R. McMaster, who banned PowerPoint presentations when he led the successful effort to secure the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar in 2005, followed up at the same conference by likening PowerPoint to an internal threat . "It's dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control," General McMaster said in a telephone interview afterward . "Some problems in the world are not bullet - izable ." </P> <P> Several incidents, about the same time, gave wide currency to discussions by serving military officers describing excessive PowerPoint use and the organizational culture that encouraged it . In response to the New York Times story, Peter Norvig and Stephen M. Kosslyn sent a joint letter to the editor stressing the institutional culture of the military: "...many military personnel bemoan the overuse and misuse of PowerPoint...The problem is not in the tool itself, but in the way that people use it--which is partly a result of how institutions promote misuse . </P> <P> The two generals who had been mentioned in 2010 as opposing the institutional culture of excessive PowerPoint use were both in the news again in 2017, when James N. Mattis became U.S. Secretary of Defense, and H.R. McMaster was appointed as U.S. National Security Advisor . </P> <P> Musician David Byrne has been using PowerPoint as a medium for art for years, producing a book and DVD and showing at galleries his PowerPoint - based artwork . Byrne has written: "I have been working with PowerPoint, the ubiquitous presentation software, as an art medium for a number of years . It started off as a joke (this software is a symbol of corporate salesmanship, or lack thereof) but then the work took on a life of its own as I realized I could create pieces that were moving, despite the limitations of the' medium ."' </P>

Discuss the different views available in ms powerpoint