On the contrary. A part of the essay is available online, from the linked page. Tufte is very clear that it is possible to have informative presentations - but slideware does not help towards this goal. He argues that slides have a terrible bandwidth, and do not help anyone but the worst 5% of presenters, where they help by imposing structure - any structure at all - on the presentation. All other presenters, he states, would be better off without slides, and should rather just talk, or, better, give their audience their ideas in written form, as sentences made of words rather than slides made of points, and talk about them once they have been read and understood.
I think you're missing Tufte's point. He's not saying PowerPoint is useless- he's saying the way it gets used 95% of the time is useless. Too often they end up putting their outlines directly into their slides, bullet point by bullet point, and insert graphics as a distracting afterthought. PowerPoint makes it really easy to do this, people are lazy, and this is what the audience has come to expect.
That doesn't mean slideware HAS to be used that way. Steve Jobs tends to do quite well with it. Tufte himself uses PowerPoint for his conferences. I imagine he'd agree with most of what was said in the article. Keep it clean and visual, as a way of cueing the audience with mental images and (extremely sparingly) emphasizing the keyest of key points with text. It should be a springboard for the presentation and not the presentation itself.
Don't throw the baby out with the bath water- these programs were created and has become so popular because they do something people want, and they're the best tools people have, even if they are wielded clumsily.
The essay you linked is titled "The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within". The link from that page is to an excerpt of an essay titled "PowerPoint Does Rocket Science: Assessing the Quality and Credibility of Technical Reports". Given that they have different titles, I suspect they are not the same essay, and the latter essay concludes not with PowerPoint being unable to transmit information, but with a (sensible) recommendation to use technical reports when technical reports are called for.
