iPhone lawsuit, don't believe a word

Make no mistake about it, the iPhone from Apple is the quintessential in cool technology. This much is undisputed.

However, Apple has an interesting situation on their hands with a lawsuit coming from Cisco, who actually owns the trademark to the name "iPhone". Interestingly enough, Steve Jobs of Apple came right out and decided to call his phone the iPhone as well, despite not owning the trademark.

Gutsy Steve, gutsy.

However, I don't buy it. You can bet your bottom dollar that this is a marketing stunt.

Lets look at the facts:

• Apple has been in "negotiations" with Cisco for a few years over the iPhone trademark.
• Cisco released an "iPhone" only two months before the launch of Apple's iPhone, even though they have owned the trademark for many years.
• Apparently, The companies left the negotiating table at 8 p.m. the night before the iPhone announcement, with only a few points left to negotiate.

Lets analyze this situation for a moment, what does each party have a stake here?

• The iPhone trademark is not really worth much to Cisco as their iPhone is only a marginal side business. There are plenty of other "i____" products that are knock-offs of the iPod line, and Cisco's product will fall in that category of products in consumers' minds. Over the long term, the iPhone name means nothing to Cisco.
  
• The iPhone would be nice to have for Apple, but Apple could call it the iPumpkinHead and still not lose any sales.

My skepticism arises from the fact that the current situation is not in favor of anybody, despite the parties having ample time to negotiate. Furthermore, Cisco's "explanation" of why negotiations broke down doesn't hold water:

Fundamentally we wanted an open approach. We hoped our products could interoperate in the future. In our view, the network provides the basis to make this happen—it provides the foundation of innovation that allows converged devices to deliver the services that consumers want. Our goal was to take that to the next level by facilitating collaboration with Apple. And we wanted to make sure to differentiate the brands in a way that could work for both companies and not confuse people, since our products combine both web access and voice telephony. That’s it. Openness and clarity. (Cisco Blog)

Apple is NOTORIOUS for being NOT open. They build their entire platform around a core philosophy of non-interoperability with their hardware/software mode operandi.

In other words, to ask Apple for interoperability in exchange for a silly name is just
absurd. It's not negotiating in good faith, and Cisco knows it.

Here's what I think actually happened. Cisco is trying to extort an absurd amount of money out of Apple for the iPhone name. Apple, knowing that the name is worth nothing to anybody but Apple, called Cisco's bluff. Then, Cisco realized that there is more to gain by riding on the Marketing coattails of Apple, and agreed to go into a drawn out, public war with Apple over the name.

This costs Apple nothing, and Cisco get the kind of advertising that money can't even buy.

I think they have already come to a deal. They will just publicly "pretend" to reach a settlement the day before the Apple iPhone release.

Am I cynical? Maybe... but this is the only scenario that makes any business sense, and at the end of the day it's still all business.