Let me sum up the message first: It doesn’t matter how big a company, how nice the slides, or how many the presenters…DO NOT OVER REUSE YOUR SLIDES. Well now that I have said it, I’ll elaborate.

This was our experience at a recent iPhone Dev Talk conducted by Apple at the Maurya Sheraton in New Delhi. For the uninitiated, Apple has been conducting these talks across the globe to encourage the development of applications on its new mobile platform, the iPhone.

In my opinion, the Apple IPhone is a game-changing product which shines because of its technical superiority, excellent marketing and innovative ideas. With such a breakthrough product backing you up, its hard to go wrong in a developer session. However, the presenters failed to make an impact, in no small part because they seemed to be sharing a common slide deck with a few changes. When you couple that with the fact that no time was allotted for questions even at the end, the audience is left to wonder if they didn’t have enough to talk about (Any experienced presenter will tell you that they have had to reuse or refer back to a slide or two but never more).

In a nutshell: If your content is dry, don’t make it worse by repetition. Yawn…zzzzz