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Vista Indicates A Shift in Microsoft's Priorities
jcatcw writes "After hundreds of hours of testing Vista, Scot Finnie is supremely tired of it. And of Microsoft. Although 80% of the changes in Windows Vista are positive, there is nothing about Vista that is truly innovative or compelling; there's no transformational, gotta-have-it feature in Vista. But the real problem isn't with Vista. It's with Microsoft itself. His opinion is that Microsoft has stopped focusing on end users. They 'now seemingly make many decisions based on these two things: 1. Avoiding negative publicity (especially about security and software quality) 2. Making sure the largest enterprise customers are happy.'"
Cisco's iPhone trademark dates to 1996, when it originated within Infogear Technology. The iPod dates to 2001. The iMac dates to 1998.
Now, it's true that Cisco wasn't being very protective of the name and may have failed to protect it by legal standards. They may have renamed the Linksys CIT series solely to try to keep the rights to the trademark, and may have failed to do that.
It's clear, though, that in 1996 the iPod and iMac had no influence on the cell phone, IP phone, or even the MP3 player markets. Unless someone within Infogear Technologies was a rival to Einstein and Hawking, there was no way to speculate that the iMac, iPod, then iPhone would come out of Apple over the course of a decade. To run a business on such speculation would likely be suicide anyway.
Maybe Infogear, and now Cisco (or maybe the Cisco of the future) had/has/will have an iTimeMachine, but Occam's Razor suggests coincidence over John Connor coming back to stop Skynet and discussing Apple's product lines with Bob Marshall and/or Sandy Lerner.