First look: SlideRocket goes HTML5
You probably know that I wish the world would move off of MIcrosoft PowerPoint. It is definitely the king of presentation software, but there are a raft of tools that are better now, especially if you look at SlideRocket and Prezi.
Context & Ripple Effects
The presentation-tools story until this point has mostly been about craft, not technology: back in September 2007, Presentation Zen dissected how Bill Gates and Steve Jobs actually structure their talks, treating slides as a performance art layered on top of whatever tool shipped with the office suite.
Robert Scoble's first look at SlideRocket's HTML5 rebuild changes the frame from how slides look to where they run. His framing in the piece is explicit — he calls Microsoft PowerPoint 'the king of presentation software' while arguing that SlideRocket and Prezi are already better tools — so an HTML5 version matters because it removes the last practical excuse for staying on the incumbent: playback that depends on a specific desktop application.
First-order effects
- SlideRocket gains a deck format that runs natively in browsers, letting it compete for PowerPoint's installed base on device reach rather than feature parity.
- Prezi, which Scobleizer names alongside SlideRocket as the better-than-PowerPoint option, now shares the challenger slot with a direct competitor whose technical barrier to switching has just dropped.
Second-order effects
- Microsoft's response lever narrows: if reviewers rate challengers as simply better and those challengers run anywhere, defending PowerPoint on file-format familiarity alone gets harder, pushing the fight toward Office's broader workflow lock-in.
- Reviewers and buyers comparing 'PowerPoint alternatives' get a new axis — web-native delivery — which fragments the alternative category between browser-first tools like SlideRocket and canvas-style tools like Prezi.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, presentation authoring migrates from a desktop file owned by one vendor toward browser-delivered services, and the incumbent's durable advantage shifts from the .ppt format to the surrounding Office ecosystem it is bundled with.
The trend: Presentation software is moving from a desktop-file monopoly held by PowerPoint toward browser-native challengers built on HTML5, with tool quality rather than format compatibility becoming the deciding factor.