Powerpoint is proof that product distribution can be just as important as product quality, maybe more so.

Powerpoint is a wildly inferior product – its fucking maddening and I hate using it. It’s worst in its class. Literally every one of these presentation products is better than Powerpoint:

• Google Slides
• Keynote
• Prezi
• Canva
• Figma Slides
• Adobe Spark

But I still use it, regularly. I don’t really have a choice. My company has it bundled as part of Office and everyone else in the company uses it. This is how Powerpoint, despite being straight up bad, maintains a 25% market share among presentation software, coming in 2nd to only Canva at nearly 50%.

It would be so easy for Microsoft, one of the most valuable companies to ever exist, to make it better. They have infinite resources they could throw at it – their market cap as of writing is $3 Trillion Dollars. They could buy a smaller software company that makes one of these superior products, like Prezi, and integrate that into Powerpoint. None of these efforts would make a dent in Microsoft’s financials.

Yet they don’t. They don’t have to.

Powerpoint comes bundled with Microsoft Office, and many enterprises are loathe to pay for additional products when they get one that’s “good enough” for free within their ecosystem, especially when everyone else in the company is also already using. As a result, millions of people like me across the enterprise make an eye-watering 30 million Powerpoint presentations per day. This has led to millions of users who are comfortable with and even prefer it despite the existence of superior alternatives. This entropic loop makes it less likely that these users would try a new software even if they could. Instead, they will just go with what they know.

Superior distribution permits an inferior product to grow and maintain market share.