No need to be so dramatic. There are a lot of things you can do with just speaking supported by a whiteboard with markers.
When I was still teaching, I’d do this sometimes. Just do a lecture with a whiteboard and draw data structures and algorithms. It’s often much more engaging than prepared slides.
Yes, I know it doesn’t work for every possible presentation, but for many it does.
Totally. But today, the room will not be well set up for it, markers may be dry, whiteboard covered in old, settled in diagrams, etc. And half the people dialing in. All solvable, but not in 30 minutes.
And for larger work presentations the expectation even 30 years ago was not whiteboards; that is very inefficient. It was transparencies. But try printing those in a pinch. And finding a projector.
That's not to say that a key tool outage should kill a presentation (and if it was important, do it early); but it is not a do-not-care either.
How does any tech company or team operate without whiteboards?
It's much easier to anticipate dry markers (keep a small stock) than outage of Claude or Microsoft.
(Yes, I know that the slippery slope is in jest.)
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