Why is BestMacs plural?

Here’s a little 10-year-anniversary trivia.

Back when I first moved to Lawrence and started thinking about a business identity, the name of the business was semi-obvious; letting my last name promote the business was restitution for all the grade school jokes.  But I was initially going to call it BestMac.

That is until I went to register “bestmac.com” – turns out it had been registered just 10 months earlier to Leonard and Tamara Rubin, Mac consultants out of Portland, Oregon.  I don’t know how the name came to them, but it left me with an odd decision – ask them to sell me the domain (not likely for a 2-month-old start-up) or come up with a different name.

As an aside, those of you who have been with me since 2000-01 might remember it was “Best Macs Computer Solutions.”  When we incorporated in 2002, we dropped the “computer solutions” part to just be “Best Macs, Inc.”  Further, if you look at our listing on the Apple Consultants Network locator it’s “Best MacSolutions”  because the legal eagles in Cupertino didn’t like the word Macs as a standalone. Later on the same group figured that a suffix would be OK, hence our current usage as all one word.

Anyway, Tamara and Len are heading in a few different directions now.  If you’re in Portland, OR or the Bay Area (and I thought my service area was long-distance), you can look them up on LeonardRubin.com but they are also trying some intriguing new ventures in cycling including The Ultimate Folding Bicycle and the Portland Bicycle Trailer Company.

However, their most important mission is raising awareness of the dangers of lead poisoning in children.  Much as March of Dimes is important to me because of personal experience, I’m sorry to say that this cause is based on personal experience for the Rubin Family.  Donations are accepted on the website and it’s a great cause.

The Rubins recently sold me the rights to “bestmac.com” and it now leads you here.  I wonder how many hits their website has gotten from Kansas over the years, and how many of your emails to me bounced because of that missing “s” between “c” and “.com”.  Now they’ll arrive as expected. I’m not about to change the name of the business at this point, but I’d like to thank Len and Tamara for thinking of me when they parted with the domain, and wish them the best of luck in their new ventures.

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