Slide Bureau

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

~ the obit ~

Slide Bureau sold design rather than software. You opened the iPad app, picked a template built for your line of work, dropped your own content into it, and the deck came out looking like a designer had made it, because one had. Jackson Fish Market, a six-person studio in Seattle, launched it on 26 February 2014.

The studio's founders, Hillel Cooperman and Jenny Lam, were ex-Microsoft colleagues who had been running the firm since 2007, and the pitch was aimed at people who have to present without having a design department. Teachers and realtors were the named examples. The templates were deliberately narrow. "No one else is going to use a teacher template except for teachers, but that's O.K.," Cooperman said at launch, and if the one you needed did not exist, the studio's designers would draw it for you on request.

There was no presentation-wide theme either, so slides inside one deck were free not to match. Some of them were live: a realtor could embed a working map, a bar owner could pull in a reporter's tweets. Authoring happened only on the iPad, while a finished deck was a URL that opened in any browser and could be driven remotely from the app.

On 17 December 2014 the company emailed its customers that the service would close on 24 December. "Collectively, you created thousands of presentations. You gave us tons of great suggestions. You were incredibly generous with your time and your creativity," the letter began, before the part that mattered: "Unfortunately, for the moment, we've decided to close Slide Bureau while we digest all your feedback and suggestions and decide where Slide Bureau should head next." What followed was an export procedure. Get a free Dropbox account, save each presentation as PDF, JPG or MP4, one at a time, by Christmas Eve.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ "for the moment" ~

It did not reopen. Jackson Fish Market carried on as a design studio, and Slide Bureau sits in its portfolio as a finished piece of work, described in the past tense. Ten months is short even for an app, and the closing letter is the only surviving document that treats it as something people had used.

~ the device it demanded ~

An iPad in Turkey in 2014 was priced like an appliance once the tax was on it, and the people making slides for a living were making them in PowerPoint on whatever the office had already bought. A tool that could only author on one expensive device had drawn the edges of its market before it shipped a line of code. Everyone else got the viewer, which was a web page.

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