Seattle’s Apple Users Tap into Westwind Computing
for the Fruits of their Macintosh Knowledge
Since 1989, Westwind Computing partners Michael Koidahl and Gordon Davisson have been tilling the fertile creative soil of the Puget Sound computing community. You could say they’ve been cultivating their very own Apple Macintosh orchard, and doing it on the slopes of Mount Microsoft, no less. Like the early desktop Macs, no larger than a telephone book in size, the firm began with a small “footprint,” a mere 400 square feet of office space and $400 in working capital. But Washington has always been a good place to grow apples. After moving into their current headquarters at the intersection of 65th Street and NE Ravenna Boulevard in 1993, things began to ripen, and accelerated with the advent of the Internet. In fact, during ’95-96′, the company sold more of Apple’s Internet Server Solution than anybody else in the U.S. Lest we forget, at that time, Mac-based Web servers exceeded the Windows NT and ’95 variety combined.
Apple’s first Internet Server Solution, named AISS, was a combination of the Mac OS and server software from Webstar. As Internet commerce began to take off, Apple came to owe a large debt of gratitude to the Pacific Northwest and not only for Westwind’s stalwart sales. Across town, another Puget Sound outfit, known as Blue World Communications, was developing a software bridge, called Lasso, that could serve up items to the Internet from Apple’s classic database Filemaker Pro. Ironically, the first server Westwind sold was to BlueWorld’s president Bill Doerrfeld. The server went straight into Doerrfeld’s basement where Apple’s head of product marketing for the server group soon made a special pilgrimage to glimpse this Northwest ingenuity.
Those good old days have given way to the hypermodern excitement of Apple’s new hardware and software innovations including its new operating system, OS X, which Koidahl considers “the ultimate platform for working on the Internet.” As a steady string of new product announcements, with names like iTunes, iPhoto, and more recently iDVD, demonstrate, where there’s Apple, there’s always something interesting to write home about. We got Michael Koidahl to impart some of the fruits of his knowledge
Seattle24x7: Michael, what kind of business was Westwind Computing doing in the early days of the Internet?
Koidahl: We grew from initially doing repairs to adding the entire Apple product line. Our strength was that we really liked helping people integrate technology, mostly small companies at that time. One of the high points was Little Nickel Want Ads. We built their first three servers which were all Macs to handle all of their online ads, and they paid for them in three months. Renton Honda used a Macintosh 6100 to build their first Web site.
Seattle24x7: What are the largest Mac installations in the Seattle area?
Koidahl: The largest number of Mac seats in a corporate client is probably Wizards of the Coast, about 400. Eddie Bauer is another interesting example. We helped move them from 100 PCs in their creative department to 100 Macs. They were able to cut their IT costs by half by reducing the IT support staff from four to two. We won the “Vendor of the Year” award from Eddie Bauer for that project by finishing 10% under budget and delivering technical services that they had considered impossible. Other major installations today include some large biotech clients who are starting to leverage the Unix of OS X. In many cases, a company will use Macs exclusively in creative. Costco is a good example where corporate uses PCs but their creative department is all Mac. And then Microsoft has 300 Macs, but of course four jillion PCs (laughs).
Seattle24x7: What is your official affiliation with Apple?
Koidahl: We are an Apple Specialist, which means we are an Apple reseller that sells more than 50% Mac product, and we do more than a half-million in business yearly. We’re an Apple Authorized Service Center which means we have Apple certified technicians on staff. We’re also Apple Solution Experts which means we have consultants on staff.
Seattle24x7: And these days, Apple has become something of a competitor?
Koidahl: That’s one of our biggest challenges of the past few years. Apple has become more and more prevalent as a competitor.
Seattle24x7: Yet you can support the Apple products you sell in some very valuable ways?
Koidahl: What many people are discovering is what makes the unique value add to Westwind is our knowledge. This is something that we focus on intently and strive to do as well as we possibly can. I mean, why would you buy here vs. online direct? Extra service, training and product knowledge. It’s giving that value back to the customer.
Seattle24x7: You design your own training courses?
Koidahl: All our classes, from OS X Bootcamp to Final Cut Pro are built by us. We try to build them around what the customer needs, not around the product. Our OS X Bootcamp is a two day, incredibly intensive class for IT professionals to get as much information to support and deploy OSX as possible. The Apple class is designed to teach you all the features, but the features change (laughs). Secondly, with Apple there’s a big chunk of marketing involved. Our way of thinking is that when you’re paying us to teach you, you don’t need the marketing but the nuts and bolts. With Final Cut, (our one day class), you buy Final Cut, you take the class, you go home and you make a movie. You don’t learn every feature of Final Cut because you need to learn the basics. But it’s a good jump start to get you through that first start up.
Seattle24x7: Tell us about OS X. You seem genuinely ecstatic about it.
Koidahl: What impresses me about OS X is all the little things. The way it handles multimedia and the Internet and PDF’s, which for some reason is not being talked about a lot, is huge! Being able to pre-flight a file by clicking on it and getting a preview changes everything. In the Finder, when I click in a certain format, called Column View, and I click on a document, it generates a PDF preview immediately on the side. So I can see that it’s a marketing slide. I click on the next file name and I see it’s a pricing table. It sounds simple, but It’s really nice to be able to see these thumbnails. You can see what the document is. Same thing with MP3’s and JPEG’s and EPS’s if there’s an embedded thumbnail. As a user, I have tons of stuff on my machine. It helps me use the OS better.
Seattle24x7: We’ve heard you consider OS X to be the ultimate platform for Internet productivity and functionality. Why is that?
Koidahl: Well the first thing is that it fixes Java. OS X makes the Mac a J2E compliant -machine. It’s the most current, stable, Unix-based Java which is HUGE, because the Mac version’s always been kind of buggy and the Windows version is a strap-on that you beg someone else for because Microsoft doesn’t do it either. So now you get the ability to run Java apps. In fact it’s funny when you look at Apple’s marketing slides, they talk about environment — they never talk about Java. But Java’s one of the environments you can write code in.
For another thing, it’s a very mature operating system that uses all the cool, new technologies as opposed to an OS that keeps getting built on an old foundation. The whole system is based on XML. All the preference files are XML. We’re noticing a lot of things that support SOAP (Simple Object Application Protocol) which are really cool.
Seattle24x7: Can you give us an example?
Koidahl: One of my favorite apps is called Watson. It’s a $20 shareware app that uses SOAP to look up everything from your Fedex packages to what’s on TV in your neighborhood. If you click within Watson on “Movies,” there’s a preference pane to ask for your zip code. Watson will list the theaters within a 5 mile radius of my house. So if I want to go the Grand Illusion, I click on it It pops up that it’s showing “It Happened One Night.” I click on the movie. It tells me the two showing times. A bottle pane pops up with a preview and a summary of the movie. And it just did all of that while I was talking to you. It’s a small piece of shareware that uses SOAP.
Seattle24x7: You also like OS X’s security?
Koidahl: Well, it ships with everything turned off. And it’s very clear what’s off. It’s very clear when you turn it on, the risks you take. Also, since its core is open-source, it gets a lot more exposure, people are more familiar with it. You don’t see a lot of people beating on Linux to take over Linux machines because if it happens, they kill the guy, they fix it and they move on (laughter).
Seattle24x7: There also seems to be a fairly broad suite of tools that begin with the letter i?
Koidahl: There’s iTools which is fundamentally a part of OS X. You set up an iDisk, [a remote 20 Mb hard drive on Apple servers-Ed.] and it treats it as just another part of the machine. You can connect to your iDisk online and move files. The iTune and iPhoto products are great things because they work so seamlessly. Why is it that people have really not got that excited about MP3’s on the PC side? It’s weird, there are a lot of high-tech people trading files, but when I talk to friends who’ve just owned PCs forever, my brother’s a good example, they’ve never really done it. It’s hard to figure out which player to get and the interfaces are kind of garish, and they don’t know how to actually load the CD’s. My brother saw my little sister build a custom music CD on a Mac while he watched. Can you do it on a PC? Sure, but not seamlessly.
Seattle24x7: Apple seems to be doing the same thing with photography and movies?
Koidahl: Why did Apple jump on the desktop movie thing? It’s because they’ve made it incredibly simple. How long have digital cameras been one of the top sellers for Christmas? At least two years. Why isn’t there a decent way to organize photos or order prints? Apple’s vision is unique because it’s simple. It pulls the photos automatically off the camera and drops them into this nice little window for managing your database of photos. You drag them into albums.
Seattle24x7: You can also order prints online?
Koidahl: Apple has leveraged the Internet so well. You can order prints, right through their site from the iPhoto application. As a parent, I can order a bound book of glossy pages of my kids with a hard back for $30 bucks and send it to my Mom for Christmas. It’s the same for a scientist organizing his lab data — the images that come off his microscope that come in digitally. The scientist can also use iPhoto — for free! And iDVD — you finally have a way to archive all those old home movies. As Apple picks a product to help enhance that value — the better the platform gets!
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