The Man Who Ran the Same Conference for 23 Years
There is a figure in the presentation industry named Rick Altman.
For 23 years he has hosted the Presentation Summit, the world’s largest conference dedicated to presentations.
Seventeen books to his name.
He has enough standing in the field to publish a book titled Why Most PowerPoint Presentations Suck.
His pitch is that he can move across three domains at once — design, speaking, and branding.
He has said publicly that very few people can do all three. That is probably true.
But one thing has been nagging at me.
Inside the Microsoft Ecosystem
Altman makes a point of branding the Summit as “completely unsponsored by Microsoft.”
Independent. Beholden to no one.
Which is why he can criticize PowerPoint to its face.
And yet — nearly every speaker on stage and every help-desk volunteer is a Microsoft MVP.
There is no direct money from Redmond, but the dependency on the Microsoft community runs deep.
It looks like independence. It functions as embedment in the ecosystem.
You could call it twenty-three years of growing old alongside the same toolset.
When the Tools Kept Breaking
My twenty years went differently.
Flash paid the bills for a stretch. Client work ran on Flash, ActionScript 3, hand-tuned timeline animation. The income was real. Then Flash died — and the entire skill set evaporated with it.
Next came jQuery and responsive design. Smartphones rewrote everything. The assumption of a fixed canvas collapsed, and the craft was reset to zero. From jQuery to React. From servers to serverless. The half-life of accumulated knowledge kept shrinking.
Then AI. This time the very act of writing code had its premises rewritten.
I have lived through at least four moments when the technical bedrock dropped out from under me.
Anyone around 44 has probably weathered this transition more times than any other cohort. We touched the early internet as teenagers, ran through the Flash era in our twenties, crossed the smartphone revolution in our thirties, and reached for AI in our forties.
We never knew an era of stable tools. So the instinct to bet on a single platform never formed.
What “Cross-Domain” Actually Means
Altman’s three-domain fluency is impressive. He can talk design, speech, and branding with equal authority.
But all three sit inside an existing frame.
How to make it. How to show it. How to deliver it.
Every question is a How.
The whole thing lives at the layer of tools and technique.
Because his tools held still for two decades, he could perfect the How.
That was a sound survival strategy.
What You Think About After the Break
People who have been forced to switch every time their tools broke start asking past the How.
What stays true regardless of the toolset?
Fonts, layout, animation — all tool-bound.
But “what kind of atmosphere should carry this idea?” — that question has no toolchain.
PowerPoint, Keynote, Figma — the question is identical.
Each time a tool collapsed, another layer of tool-independent thinking got chiseled out.
The change itself was the strength training.
2025: Two Different Skylines
In 2025, Altman moved his 23-year-old in-person conference to virtual. Attendance was down.
A box he had defended for 23 years was reshaped by external pressure.
That same year, I was building an AI-driven presentation generation pipeline. PowerPoint format on the output side, zero dependence on Microsoft’s worldview on the input side. Designed in HTML, transformed by AI. A structure that uses the tool from outside the tool.
We lived through the same era. One was pushed by change. The other used it.
This is not a difference in ability. It is a difference in how the muscles were trained.
When the Shape of the Question Changes
Altman’s twenty years were spent being better than anyone else at working inside the existing frame. Running the same conference for 23 years is no small feat.
But the structure of the question — how to make, how to show, how to deliver — has not moved in 23 years. All How.
People who have been displaced by tool death after tool death are used to the question itself shifting shape. When Flash died, the move wasn’t to find another animation tool — it was to ask whether animation was even necessary. When smartphones arrived, the move wasn’t to scale the canvas down — it was to question the canvas as a premise.
So when AI arrived, the move wasn’t to make AI generate slides. It was to ask whether the slide format was still needed at all.
It isn’t the How that changes. It is the What. And whether you can see that depends on whether you have lived through a What changing before.
Twenty years polished inside stability sharpened the precision of How. Twenty years drilled inside change built the muscle to interrogate What.
The next twenty years are a game played on the What side. The How is something AI handles now.