Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are trying to liberate us from slide decks. Good luck with that.

Getty Images; Alyssa Powell/BI

YYou've just been added to a meeting. It's late afternoon, late in the week, and someone is presenting a deck. Geez, here we go. The presenter reads words that you can also read from a bulleted list on a lightly decorated page projected before you. Next slide. Because you've seen hundreds of PowerPoint presentations since your sixth-grade science-fair days, you instinctively know this one's going to take the full hour. Eyes glaze over, yawns are stifled. Next slide. The presenter attempts to play an embedded video, but the audio doesn't work. "You get the idea" though. Next slide.