Prezi Classic

» see prezi.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

i saw prezi for the first time in a computer engineering seminar around 2010. a classmate had rebuilt his term-project slides in it and the projector ran through the whole thing as one continuous zoom instead of a slide sequence. what it did that powerpoint could not do was pan around an infinite canvas and zoom into one detail before pulling back. the effect landed once and got tired the second time. that was the argument for and against prezi in one presentation. for the next few years it kept showing up in academic talks and startup pitches across turkey, the same way it did everywhere else.

prezi inc. was incorporated in budapest on 20 may 2009 by adam somlai-fischer and peter arvai, with peter halacsy on the tech side. somlai-fischer had been an interaction designer and had prototyped the zoom-and-pan interface as an art project before the company existed. arvai took the ceo role. the first product was pure flash, both the editor and the runtime, which was a defensible choice in 2009 when flash was still the standard rich-media layer on the desktop web.

by 2012 prezi had crossed 15 million users on the strength of a free tier and academic word of mouth. tc disrupt talks and university lecture halls filled up with prezi decks that year. by 2015 the number was over 60 million registered accounts. the zoom mechanic had already crossed into cliche by then. presenters mostly used it to set up one big reveal per talk instead of the sustained pan-and-zoom that the first prezi decks had shown off.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it landed ~

prezi's real audience was smaller than the account numbers suggested. universities where flash still ran in the classroom projector, conference organizers who wanted the visual differentiation, sales teams trying to feel less corporate. the paid tiers sold to those users, plus a small enterprise slice. what prezi did not have was a serious foothold in offices that already ran on powerpoint through the office suite license. that boundary held all the way through the classic era.

~ the day it died ~

adobe posted the flash player end-of-life notice on 25 july 2017, giving a runway of three and a half years. actual flash content stopped running in the player on 12 january 2021. prezi's classic online editor had already been deprecated in favor of prezi next by then, but the classic desktop app kept working because it bundled its own flash-based runtime. that runtime kept limping through 2021 and into the first half of 2022. on 30 june 2022 prezi blocked the classic desktop app entirely, killing both editing and playback. users had a window before that date to sync their local decks up to the online account and convert them to the html5-based prezi present editor.

~ what got buried with it ~

what actually died on 30 june 2022 was ten years of student and speaker decks that had been authored in the classic format. prezi present could import them but the conversion did not always keep the exact pan choreography that made the original file work. some of the more elaborate 2011-2014 prezis, the ones that took real effort to arrange on the infinite canvas, lost their timing on import. the runtime was gone, and with it the format's whole native execution model. all that survived was screenshots and youtube exports of the reveal.

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