How Steve Jobs “stole” the iPhone from Cisco

January 9, 2007

Wearing the “school uniform” of jeans and black jacket created by “school”, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs took the stage at the Macworld conference in San Francisco exactly 15 years ago to present what he described as “a revolutionary device… that it changes everything “. He may not have been modest, but he was right.

“An iPod, a phone and a device that communicates with the internet. An iPod, a phone phone Do you pick it up? “These are not three different devices, this is one device and we call it the iPhone,” he said. It was the birth of the most successful product in the modern history of technology.

What few know is that Apple did not have the iPhone name rights at the time. These belonged to Cisco, which had patented the brand in 2000 (as well as “IOS”), after acquiring a company called Infogear. In fact, Infogear has been selling phone devices under the iPhone name for a long time.

Steve Jobs was well aware that the iPhone name belonged to Cisco. Prior to the launch of his smartphone, he had called Charles Giancarlo, then a Cisco executive, about the issue.

“Steve picked me up and said he wanted to use it,” Giancarlo would later recall. “She did not offer us anything in return. It was like a promise that he would be our best friend. And we said, ‘No, we intend to use it.’ ”

Jobs took the risk by announcing the iPhone name anyway.

The next day, Cisco filed a lawsuit, with the two companies resolving the dispute through a vague compromise a little later.

In the aftermath, however, Jobs’s decision to take the stage and present a product that would make a splash with a name that did not belong to him was certainly one of the biggest risks in the history of branding.

And he was right. The visionary businessman spoke that day of a “revolutionary and magical product that is literally five years ahead of any other mobile phone”.

Six months later, thousands of consumers lined up outside Apple stores to be among the first to pick up the iPhone.

The 4GB model cost $ 499 and the 8GB model sold for $ 599.

In November 2007, when more than 1.4 million iPhones had already been sold, Time magazine named him Invention of the Year.

The iPhone went on sale in parts of Europe near the end of 2007 and in parts of Asia in 2008. In July 2008, Apple launched the App Store.

In 2012, five years since the iPhone debuted, more than 200 million devices had already been sold.

The iPhone turned Apple into one of the most successful companies ever, as a few days ago it became the first to break the 3 trillion barrier. capitalization dollars.

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