Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

At a glance, you’d be forgiven for thinking otherwise. Sway is a new tool that lets users string together images, text, and bullet points in a visually arresting way. In other words, Sway creates presentations, much like PowerPoint. It’s even part of the Microsoft Office suite, having just shed its "Preview" designation after 10 months of private and public testing.

But as Pratley points out, Sway isn’t meant for the same exact audience as PowerPoint. It’s a much simpler program, with far fewer controls, and most of its formatting is automatic, so each Sway can adapt to any screen size on a PC, tablet, or phone. The fact that you can’t tweak things down to the individual pixel, as with PowerPoint, is by design. "Anything where you’re building a complicated layout, that’s really a PowerPoint scenario, and not a Sway one," says Pratley, who is Sway’s founder and general manager.

(Microsoft isn't the only company taking this approach, as Sway is competing with other new-age presentation tools like Prezi andHaiku Deck.)

Sway also diverges from Microsoft’s traditional approach to developing software, especially Office. Instead of building most of the product and collecting a bit of private feedback before launch, Microsoft asked users to get involved early on, giving them a fairly minimal product and adding feature requests over the preview period.

The approach is reflective of a company that wants people to feel warmer and fuzzier about its products. Sway is unlikely to be the last example of Microsoft working this way—even if it sometimes means telling people that they’re wrong....