The initial reports were that Apple had done a deal with Cisco to get full rights to the iPhone trade mark-and I reported this in my instant reaction to the Apple iPhone announcement. However, it was untrue. Apple had negotiated with Cisco but failed to get Cisco to part with the trademark. Cisco, quite understandably, suggested sharing it.

Mark Chandler, Cisco's SVP and General Counsel, wrote the following in his blog "Today's announcement from Cisco regarding our suit with Apple over our iPhone trademark has spurred a lot of interesting questions. Most importantly, this is not a suit against Apple's innovation, their modern design, or their cool phone. It is not a suit about money or royalties. This is a suit about trademark infringement."

So Apple is now going to fight the case in court, on the basis that several companies, including Cisco, are using the iPhone trademark for a VoIP device, whereas Apple is using it for a cell phone. My guess is that Cisco probably doesn't care too much about the iPhone brand, but it is irritated by Apple's gall. It may also see an opportunity to get a stream of publicity for its own iPhone. At the same time, we should note that Cisco is actually a minor competitor of Apple that, in time, will probably become a much stronger competitor.

Cisco is in the home LAN business, making devices that help you turn all your PCs and entertainment devices into a network of a kind and pass data between them. It has a big interest in VoIP (of course) and routers (of course) and video, and it may also have its own vision of the household of the future-which doesn't exactly involve wall-to-wall Apple devices. So Cisco may have more than one axe to grind.

Suing Apple is starting to become a sport in the US-one that reflects Apple's success. Like most, if not all, successful companies of the past, when Apple found itself sitting on a de facto (music-playing) monopoly, instead of getting all "open standards" and bountiful, it quickly did its best to lock its users in.

In the world of consumer computing you really don't need to do much to lock a user in. A proprietary file format or two will normally do the trick. Apple is already under threat of legal action because of its iTunes-iPod-iMac success, but while legal action may eventually result in Apple having to get a little more "open standards", I doubt if it will trouble Apple's music business. Most iPod users never even bothered to look at a Zune, because they were never going to go to the trouble of exporting their music files to some other device.