Surprise, surprise. Cisco is suing Apple over the ‘iPhone’ trademark. Well, it does come as somewhat of a surprise, since up until Cisco announced the lawsuit yesterday afternoon, it appeared the companies were on the verge of an agreement regarding the name. I guess the agreement must have fallen through at the last moment.
To be honest, the lawsuit surprises me quite a bit, since I just assumed Apple had worked out the legal details of iPhone before announcing the product. The fact that Cisco was allowed to release its iPhone line of VoIP products in December appeared to be just more strategic wizardry on the part of Apple: let everyone think that iPhone name was already taken, and therefore Apple iPhone was not about to be announced at Macworld Expo. Throw the rumor-mongers off track, and then, boom, surprise everyone with the announcement after all.
I guess the situation was more complicated than it appeared on the surface.
Of course, in characteristically tight-lipped form, Apple isn’t saying a word about all this. ZDNet The Apple Core blogger Jason O’Grady criticized the company for its silence in a post today: “Apple needs to fire up the blogs.apple.com subdomain now and start blogging about such things. I mean, if big companies like Microsoft and Cisco blog, why doesn't Apple?”
He has a point, but that’s not the game Apple plays. Maybe it should, but commenting would be decidedly un-Apple-like.
The drama continues.
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