There was quite a bit of coverage last week about the partnership between Apple and Cisco. A partnership between two large technology companies is not necessarily exciting news in itself, but I find the particular circumstances surrounding this partnership quite interesting.
The partnership was created in settlement of the trademark infringement suit Cisco brought against Apple over the ‘iPhone’ name. I.e. “Fine we’ll drop the suit and let you use the name, but only if you partner with us”.
Let me be clear that the official announcement did not divulge any specific details about the partnership, the motivations behind its creation, nor what the partnership will involve. However after reading press coverage it does seem that Cisco is using its iPhone trademark as a way to force Apple to ‘cooperate’ and introduce interoperability with its networking products. As we all know Apple has a history of proprietary standards and lack of interoperability.
It seems crazy to me that one company would force another to partner. Partnerships are hard enough to manage when both parties are willing participants - it strikes me as utterly ridiculous to expect anything fruitful to emerge from a partnership where one party is forced to the table. This is truly against the spirit of partnership.
As I said this is somewhat speculative, and so I’ll end by giving Cisco the benefit of the doubt here and hope there is more to this story. I hope there is a legitimate partnership with mutual consent and some interesting plans for the future - time will tell.
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“As we all know Apple has a history of proprietary standards and lack of interoperability.”
Actually, if you know this history of Apple and personal computers, you know that this is a very asinine statement. Apple produced the first personal computer, and built it as an open standard. The first Macs with slots used an open standard slot format. People call them “proprietary” because the PC cloners chose to come up with their own standard, rather than embrace interoperability. But since Apple chose NuBus before that time, its not Apples fault. Etc. etc. etc.
I doubt you can name a time when Apple has opposed interoperability and been proprietary… hell they even open sourced their operating system!
I don’t want to get into an argument on this issue, since it misses the main point of my original post. However, since you challenge me to give an example of where Apple has opposed interoperability and been proprietary, how about http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,70436-0.html ?