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Consumer Electronics

Apple Settles With Cisco, But iPhone Success Still In Doubt

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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Apple (AAPL) and Cisco (CSCO) have reached an agreement. Cisco, which holds the trademark on the term "iPhone", will allow Apple to use the name for its new handset. Cisco will also use the name for products that allow VoIP calls over the internet.

Apple was not too bright to launch the product using the name without Cisco’s clearance, but all’s well that ends well.

Apple has suggested it could sell 10 million iPhones in 2008. That’s not very much in a global market where one billion handsets are sold per year.

Bloomberg has given a list of reasons that the iPhone will not do well, and they are compelling. One of the most credible is that the iPhone is such a late entry to the handset market that the large cell manufacturers like Motorla (MOT) and Nokia (NOK) will introduce similar products to keep share.

Another reason the iPhone may not be a success is that mobile operators like Verizon (VZ) may not want to alienate their current handset partners by taking on the new Apple phone. Verizon actually passed on the chance to distribute the iPhone to its customers.

For Apple, it’s nice to have the name, but having customers is a much bigger problem.

Douglas A. McIntyre can be reached at [email protected]. He doe not own securities in companies that he writes about.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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