Agree, nice post.

Two of the major challenges displacing PPT with interactive tools, particularly in consulting, market research type of business, where large 100+ slide decks are common, are going to be the (1) need to produce decks on clients' templates and (2) need to email decks.

The direction in which a few emerging CSS/JS based tools (slides, reveal, etc) are going will not solve that problem. D3/WebGL etc. are awesome, of course, for the web. However it's relatively rare when a busy exec will have time to use non PPT based deck.

I agree with your sentiment about email, and wanted to add that the major reason for this is still a fear of lack of Internet. There has never been a meeting I've attended in ~20 years where we didn't have a backup plan if we had no Internet. This still looks like a solutions that needs the Internet to work. MS would do well to make these formats offline and open-able with the next version of PPT. Take that to the bank!

>There has never been a meeting I've attended in ~20 years where we didn't have a backup plan if we had no Internet.

In what kind of business? This sounds like totally atypical in any modern enterprise.

Not easily. Not by your average user.

From a technical perspective a standard web page could be saved in single HTML file that can be opened offline (with all JS/CSS inlined and images base64 encoded and inclined)--so it can be as easy as double-clicking on a file (just an .html file instead of .ppt).

The average user probably lacks this knowledge though and wouldn't know to or try to double-click on an html file but it is technically feasible.

Microsoft had technology to do just this in 1999 (!). It was known as 'HTA' (Html Applications) but was ahead of its time - the rich DOM manipulation and CSS effects we have now didn't exist. HTA was discontinued years ago afaik, but in hindsight it was a peak at the future.

[can no longer edit but of course should have said 'peek' blush]