After Liebermann Inc. announced that it was releasing the Grand Canyon Professional Desktop Monitors Series in 76-inch, 81-inch and 92-inch sizes, MacCentral readers decried the company and its Web site as fakes, parodies and/or filled with anti-Mac sentiments. However, Lisa Ciesniewski, Liebermann’s PR manager, claims none of these assertions are true.
Ciesniewski said Liebermann Inc. is funded by private investors with its URL registered around five months ago. (Register.com lists www.go-I.com as having been registered on May 12 and renewed on August 28 to a Japanese address.) Though the company’s Web site just launched, Liebermann has 30 employees (full and part time) and plans to open two showrooms for their products before the end of the year, Ciesniewski told MacCentral. She said the showrooms will be in Beverly Hills, Calif., and New York City.
“We’ve been in business for several months, but mainly serving just businesses in the Los Angeles area, where we’re based,” Ciesniewski said. “We have just opened up our business to consumers and launched our Web site in conjunction with that move.”
Many Mac fans have noted that the Liebermann Web site has a design that seems very similar to Apple’s own site, though some of the content seems anti-Mac. For instance, in the online info about the company’s history, it says that the founder and CEO, film director Miguel Liebermann, first begin to think about launching his own company in 1999 when he became frustrated with the “limited computing performance” of his PowerBook running Adobe Premiere while trying to finish a Coca-Cola commercial.
“There’s absolutely no anti-Mac sentiment here,” Ciesniewski said. “We’re not trying to compete with or attack Apple or the Mac platform. Apple makes beautiful machines, and we just hope we can just bring some of that to the PC platform. As for the designers of the Web site, they come from both Mac and PC backgrounds, so they have a variety of influences on their work.”
As for the new line of Grand Canyon monitors, Ciesniewski said that some of the parts are outsourced, but that Liebermann itself assembles the monitors. She said that the displays were available for order now.
“We’re getting a ton of orders,” Ciesniewski said. “In fact, we have such a backlog that, for some orders, it will take 30-60 days for shipment.”
Liebermann also advertises their own Wintel desktops and notebooks, many of which have a Mac-like flair to them.
“Going forward, our business plan is to build the fastest PC-based Windows systems for graphic and audio users,” Ciesniewski said.
The company claims to have “close business relationships” with such companies as Microsoft, Intel, AMD, ATI, IBM, RealNetworks, Nvidia, Matrox, Kodak, and more. Liebermann also claims to be undergoing European and South American operations expansion.
MacCentral asked Ciesniewski why she felt there was such skepticism about the validity of Liebermann Inc.
“I honestly don’t know,” she said. “The only comments we’ve gotten about our being a fake or parody company have only come from certain Apple-related sites, not from everyone. Overall, the response to our announcements has been overwhelming. Percentage-wise, the negative e-mails we’re getting is minimal.”