If you want to be a category winner, let’s start with a simple but brutal question: How do you beat a 40-year-old tech incumbent at its own game?
Take a familiar example. How would you displace good old PowerPoint?
It’s been tried. Repeatedly. There’s an entire graveyard of presentation tools that aimed to do exactly that – same slide-based model, nicer templates, smoother animations, better UX. And they all failed.
Not because they weren’t better products. But because as any student of category design should appreciate, `better` didn’t matter.
Deep distribution beats product polish. Every time.
PowerPoint is pre-installed in essentially every organization on the planet. That single fact overwhelms the advantage of almost every incremental product improvement a challenger can make.
This has always been Microsoft’s playbook. Distribution first, features second. It’s how a very average early Teams displaced a much ‘better’ Zoom post-COVID. It’s why Copilot adoption is happening faster than standalone AI tools. It’s just… there.
So, if you’re trying to beat PowerPoint – or any entrenched mega-app – the real question is never, ever `how do I build a better version`?
It’s how do I and my potential users stop playing their game entirely?
Start with the business model, not the product
The mistake most challengers make is focusing on feature gaps instead of structural advantages.
PowerPoint’s obvious moats are well known:
- Distribution via the Office bundle
- The .pptx file format that everyone must support
But the deepest moat is invisible.
It’s the entrenched mental model.
In large organisations, the slide has become the basic unit of work. Strategy? Build a deck. Decision? Build a deck. Problem? Build a deck. Meetings are equated with work, and work is equated with `creating a presentation. `
That belief system is far more powerful than any file format.
When strength becomes weakness
Ironically, this is also where Microsoft’s dominance becomes a constraint.
PowerPoint is so deeply embedded that Microsoft can’t easily challenge its own assumptions without risking massive self-disruption. This is the Innovator’s Dilemma in its purest form.
Sure, they can add AI. They can level the product up to some ‘better` threat. But what they can’t easily do is change the game entirely – destroy the culture of slide-based presentations that their ecosystem depends on.
PowerPoint itself is just a refined version of what came before: slide carousels, overhead projector transparencies, corporate rituals carried forward by better software. Microsoft once won by creating a new category (presentation software) on a new platform (the PC), with an operating system that became the bridgehead for everything else.
That history matters – because it shows what real disruption looks like.
Find the constraint they can’t touch
So how do you compete? You ask a dangerous question:
If the incumbent tried to copy my product, what would they have to give up doing it?
Not small trade-offs. Really big ones. The “big pants” decisions.
For PowerPoint, those might include:
- Abandoning the slide as the core unit of work in the productivity suite
- Breaking compatibility with .pptx
- Retraining hundreds of millions of users
- Fundamentally changing how corporate work is structured
If the answer is “they could do that,” your idea is too close. You’re still playing their game.
The goal isn’t to be better. The goal is for you to be uncopiable without incumbent self-destruction.
Change the game, not the feature set
This is where technology shifts matter. Cloud, mobile, AI – each creates an opening to redesign how work is done, not just how tools are built.
But a redesign alone isn’t enough. You must change customer expectations.
Figma is a perfect example. It didn’t beat Photoshop by being a better Photoshop. It redefined what design collaboration looked like: browser-based, multiplayer by default, built for sharing and iteration. Adobe couldn’t follow without blowing up its file format, pricing model, and workflows.
That’s how categories flip.
So what might a real PowerPoint killer look like?
It wouldn’t be `AI that generates slides faster. ` That’s just PowerPoint: Slop Edition.
A real challenger would reject slides as the core idea altogether.
Instead, imagine:
- Text-based, structured narratives
- AI prompting and guiding live storytelling
- Presentations designed for reading, listening, or presenting from the same core artifact
- Dynamic visuals generated on demand, not pre-baked into decks
More like modernized note cards with intelligence – fluid, audience-aware, mobile-first.
AI doesn’t replace the thinking. It accelerates it.
That’s a fundamentally different mental mode – one far better suited to a mobile-led world than a PC-era tool designed in the 1980s.
And crucially: PowerPoint couldn’t copy it without disrupting itself.
That’s category creation.
The one question that matters
If you’re competing with an entrenched incumbent, there’s only one question worth asking: In what way could my product be so different that they can’t follow without breaking themselves?
If your answer is `better design` or `we use AI` you’re still optimizing within their paradigm.
Being better makes you a potential challenger. Being different makes you a potential category creator.