Why Apple is not doing business with Cisco?
Cisco CEO John Chambers described the company’s lawsuit against Apple as a “minor skirmish,” saying that the iPhone name-related confrontation could have been avoided if Apple had been willing to negotiate. Cisco owned the ‘iPhone’ trademark since 2000 when it acquired a firm that had registered the name, but waited to use the name until it launched a Linksys-branded product. “We told Apple for five years, ‘This is our trademark. We’ll license it to you, but it is ours,’” Chambers said. “All we ask is that people respect our trademarks and our intellectual property. We would have traded that for just interoperability, or the ability of the Apple phone to work smoothly with Cisco products.”
Why Steve Jobs is right about not doing business with Cisco? Because they are far too complicated. You know when we say that some companies are big boats… Well Cisco is one of them. I would not make business with them at that level either. That’s a shame since Cisco sells VoIP-ready equipment and is a well establish company but now Apple does not need them.