Happy Anniversary, Mac. Now Here's How To Make Us Happy

The Macintosh computer came in with a bang—well, more like a crash—in a 1984 Super Bowl commercial. Twenty-five years later, Apple's signature product is still making noise.

The Mac celebrated its silver anniversary on Jan. 24, and longtime users who became VARs are celebrating its evolution but also expressing a desire for the Mac to become more business-friendly.

Michael Oh, founder and president of Tech Superpowers, a Boston-based Apple reseller, has been using a Mac since his father brought one home in the mid-1980s.

"I was about 12 or 13 years old, so I've pretty much used Macs from very beginning, said Oh, who wrote about Mac's 25th anniversary on his company's blog, that includes a YouTube video with Steve Jobs introducing the first Mac.

"On one hand, it seems so old school. The things that seem so impressive, speech and a graphical user interface, were an incredible experience. It showed me that computers could do a lot more than what they were doing up to that point," Oh said. "Starting from day one, it had that mystique for me."

Looking forward, Oh would like to see Mac's channel evolution match its technological innovation. He feels Apple could do a better job of helping resellers gain more traction in the commercial sector.

"When Mac was released, it was released as a business computer in a sense, with spreadsheets and word processors and desktop publishing that would revolutionize computer use in business," Oh said. "Now Apple's going after consumers. That's well and good, but they haven't focused on the needs of business. They're a little late to the game and I'd like to seem them refocus on that, helping the channel get into these businesses to compete against the Windows VARs out there."

Like Oh, Bill O'Donnell, president of W. O'Donnell Consulting, a New York-based Apple VAR, turned his childhood fascination with Apple into a career.

"I was an Apple II user back in the day. I had an Apple IIc. It was my first serious computer after my Texas Instruments," he said.

But the Mac was about six years old when O'Donnell got his hands on one after he got out of the military.

"It was groundbreaking. It changed the way I interfaced with a computer. Even though I was a computer guy, I was a horrible speller and to drag and drop things and do so many things I couldn't do before, was great. The interface blew me away. It changed my life, really," O'Donnell said.

O'Donnell opened his company in 1996 and has been selling Macs ever since. He'd also like to see Apple make more of a push into the business market.

"It's Unix kernel-based so I'd like to see them strengthen their server products and make it a real tier-one server product," he said. "I'd also like to see some of the things they've experimented with, a little openness in the OS. We work with a lot of shops that have Macs in their ad division but their business side runs on Windows. There's no need for that. I'd like to see [Apple's] Open Directory become a little more powerful. The group policies in [Microsoft's] Active Directory are superior than Open Directory."

Vinny DiSpigno, CEO of Webistix, Holbrook, N.Y., started selling Macs with BusinessLand back in 1984 and has been using and reselling them ever since.

"Back in those days, we were a mix between retail walk-in and a business-to-business operation. Once that came out, the floor traffic was unbelievable. The price was a little high but people bought them anyway," DiSpigno said.

In particular, the Mac's graphical user interface and state-of-the-art word processing were things nobody had ever seen before, he said.

"They came with six or eight built-in fonts. No one had ever used that many different fonts before, and you could always tell when you got a letter from someone with a Mac because they tried to use them all. It looked like a ransom note," DiSpigno said.

Webistix sells Macs exclusively to business customers but DiSpigno said Apple is unlikely to make a big push into the commercial sector.

"I agree with [Oh's and O'Donnell's] wishes, but I don't think it will ever happen. "They've been through a lot of cycles with their enterprise push. They say they're going to make an enterprise push, then they defocus, then start it up again," DiSpigno said.

Apple's most recent swing seems to be away from the enterprise when it decided to stop making its own RAIDs, he said.

"It's a shame. When we can install Apple servers in an enterprise, they work," DiSpigno said.

Regardless, all three VARs like what they see from Apple's latest product line.

"I've sold everything from the first Mac to the latest iteration and I can tell you the product line they have now is by far superior to what else you can get on the market right now," DiSpigno said. "As long as they keep doing that, they'll be around another 25 years."