INTERVIEW With Mike Soucie, Electric Rain CEO

I spoke with Mike Soucie, Electric Rain CEO, to discuss the announcement of the STANDOUT presentation application and the strategy behind the product.

For those who haven’t heard, STANDOUT is a new presentation application—see the press release here—that attempts to provide Flash-quality graphics tools to designers and the ease-of-use of PowerPoint to non-designers. I scored an interview with Mike Soucie, CEO of Electric Rain—the company that produced STANDOUT—and learned a great deal about the new application.

Electric Rain has worked hard to identify the “pain” of both presentation designers and presenters. The notion of users’ “pain”—that is, their burning needs—came up again and again, and Soucie and the STANDOUT team worked hard to pinpoint what these pains are. They decided that the real pain in presentation design is the gap between high-quality, graphically appealing presentations (like Flash movies) and the weak bullet-pointed presentations often used in the business world (PowerPoint). Soucie had an anecdote of his own to illustrate this: a few years back at the FlashForward conference, Soucie presented a standard PowerPoint presentation (bulleted lists, mundane backgrounds) and was preceeded and succeeded by presenters with graphically rich Flash presentations—which only a Flash designer could create. Soucie tried to learn Flash at that point but it wasn’t going to happen. That experience brought to light the need for a presentation tool that would have the timeline-based graphics of Flash and the ease-of-use of PowerPoint.

Four years of development later, we have STANDOUT. Soucie’s goal, in his words, is to “change the way business presentations are created and delivered forever”. I was very impressed by Soucie’s recognition that improving presentation graphics does not mean adding a bunch of fluff to presentations—which a lot of Flash movies tend to do and are rightly criticized for. Rather, the goal is to improve the delivery of the message by allowing the information to move and change over time rather than drop in and out via a slide projector format—which is what PowerPoint basically is. Soucie is absolutely right in his assessment of Flash, its strengths as a presentation tool, and the deficiencies of PowerPoint and other slide-based presentation applications. It really doesn’t take a company CEO to see that Flash presentations are more fluid, comprehensible, and ultimately more effective.

Technologically speaking, STANDOUT requires some heavy firepower. STANDOUT is built around the .NET 3.0 framework, which is available only as a download for Windows XP or built into the new Windows Vista operating system. Because of this dependence on the operating system, STANDOUT will not work with Mac OS X (Mac users with Intel Mac machines can install a Windows operating system with .NET 3.0 and use STANDOUT that way). Soucie actually commented that users’ experience with Windows Vista on Intel Macs has been very good. My opinion is that STANDOUT’S reliance on the newest Windows technologies may be a hindrance in today’s corporate world, where many companies stick with the Windows that has proven reliable and not too fussy (usually this means Windows 2000 or maybe Windows XP). I can almost guarantee that there are very few corporations out there who have already loaded Vista onto their hardware. STANDOUT may be a few years ahead of its time.

Designers and presenters can work together better with STANDOUT, but one still can’t replace the other. The dilemma with much of today’s graphic design software is whether to create a program that is easy to use but not really heavy-duty, or create one that can do anything but requires a lot of expertise and training to use effectively. PowerPoint represents the former, Flash the latter. Electric Rain thought hard about this dilemma when creating STANDOUT and ended up splitting the application up into two versions, a Designer Edition (price point will be $500 or below) and Presenter Edition (price point around $300–400). With the Designer Edition, designers can build graphics using Microsoft Expression Blend or other graphics applications and bring them all together into what is called a design kit—think of it like a library in Flash. This kit would constitute the look and feel of the final presentation. With the Presenter Edition, a business presenter with no real design expertise can bring things together and have the ability to edit the presentation without a designer’s help. I should say that the Designer Edition can build anything from basic graphics to complete presentations, so Presenter Edition can be used just to edit a presentation if that’s all that is needed.

Right away I wondered if presenters would simply purchase Designer Edition and consider themselves designers (that’s what seems to have happened in many other area of graphic and web design) and I asked Soucie this question. He responded by pointing out his own difficulty in working with Flash and believes a non-designer working with STANDOUT Designer Edition would have a similar experience. I tend to agree: while lots of folks have muddled their way through designs with Microsoft Publisher or even QuarkXPress, not many amateurs can work their way through Flash without going insane. If STANDOUT Designer Edition is as robust as Electric Rain says it is, I would expect it to give non-designers fits as well. We’ll have to see about that when we get a beta copy (FYI, Electric Rain is hoping to release a beta version in February or March, and may possibly be a public beta).

I came away from the Soucie interview feeling that he may be onto something with STANDOUT. It really does fill a gaping hole in graphic design software out on the market: the glut of awful presentations made possible by PowerPoint and our good friends at Microsoft. (Seth Godin wrote a scathing piece on PowerPoint design, appropriately entitled “Really Bad PowerPoint” that you can read here on his blog). In my opinion, PowerPoint has driven many business presentations into the grave while giving the presenters a sense that they’ve improved their communication with technology (that is, a bunch of bulleted lists and clip art). As a designer, I want to see STANDOUT succeed. It will have many obstacles to pass in order to reach that success, but Soucie and the team at Electric Rain have good ideas and the talent to pull it off.

As mentioned before, STANDOUT has not been released yet. However, I recommend you see it in action with the 21-minute video at Electric Rain’s website.