iPhones – And the Owner is … Cisco!

In a major coup of sorts, Cisco Systems, Inc. launched its own iPhone ahead of Apple Computer. Cisco literally snatched the trademark out of Apple’s jaws, grabbing the rights to the brand name before Apple could launch its phone. The iPhone was released by Linksys, a division of Cisco Systems, Inc. on Monday. The launch comes as a major blow to Apple, which had been identified as the company about to make the launch for months now.

The embarrassment of being beaten to the punch is not all that Apple Computer will have to contend with in the days to come. There are other trickier issues involved as well, e.g., product names starting with the ‘i’, something that had come to be uniquely identified with Apple. It has in its kitty a range of ‘i’-products – the immensely popular iPod, the iSkin cover for the iPods, the iTunes online music store, the iBook laptops, and the iMac computers. So much so that the term ‘i’- had come to be associated with Apple products. Not so any more, according to market analysts and industry watchers.

Apple will now have to rethink its strategy regarding branding. The one obvious option to look at is reintroducing the term ‘Apple’ in future products. However, that would be a climb-down from the comfort zone of instant recognition even without mention of its signature.

So where did Apple slip? Apparently, the major faux pas was in not registering the trade name ‘iPhones’. However, Cisco said in a statement that it had been holding on to the trade name from as long as 2000, when it acquired Infogear, a company that had come out with a version of the iPhone in 1997. The launch was not a successful one then, and Infogear stopped production soon.

For the record, however, Apple has never officially confirmed it was moving into the mobile telephony market, though CEO Steve Jobs is expected to make a formal announcement on January 9, 2007, at the annual MacWorld Expo in San Francisco.

So now we will have to wait and watch what Apple has to offer now that the iPhone is already out there. For those that are gadget-savvy, the iPhone is basically a phone that works over the wireless network inside a person’s home, enabling him to make calls at very low rates over the Internet.