* Ability to digitize audio critical to VoIP
Last week, Cisco and Apple announced in a remarkably short statement that they had resolved their dispute over the iPhone trademark. The three-sentence press release noted that “both companies acknowledge the trademark ownership rights that have been granted, and each side will dismiss any pending actions regarding the trademark. In addition, Cisco and Apple will explore opportunities for interoperability in the areas of security, and consumer and enterprise communications.”
We’re happy for both parties to see an out-of-court settlement and we think the agreement is good for both companies as well as for their customer because it opens the door a bit further for interoperability between the networking giant and the consumer electronics giant. As any longtime cell phone user will attest, the mobile handset is increasingly getting to be more like a mobile computer and both companies’ iPhones are no exception. And we think that an increased focus on security and interoperability in the world of mobile devices is getting to be more and more important since handsets are becoming an equal partner with the desktop phone and office computer inside the enterprise network.
In another clash of the titans last week, a U.S. jury ordered Microsoft pay Alcatel-Lucent $1.5 billion in a patent infringement lawsuit over Microsoft’s use of voice encoding and decoding techniques that convert audio (including voice) into an MP-3 format. The technology is used in Microsoft’s new Vista operating software and Microsoft said it will appeal the verdict, while Alcatel-Lucent said in a statement that it was pleased with the ruling.
In a separate suit, Microsoft has filed litigation with against Alcatel-Lucent to prevent the networking company from importing unified messaging technology into the United States, according to the Associated Press.
Unlike our “much ado about nothing” opinions we issued last week, we think this time both legal suits are “much ado” about some very important issues. Legal opinions and precedents aside, the ability to digitize audio is critical for moving forward with VoIP and other audio-visual applications, and optimized unified communications applications should be offered without limiting their deployment to geographical boundaries.
The bottom line is that since both of these technologies are important to convergence and both hold large financial value, we expect to see more legal suits over convergence technology in the future. In the ideal world, everybody gets along without lawsuits. But in the real world with such “big money” at stake, this may just be the beginning for some very interesting court cases.
