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iPhone Letdown: A Fitting End To The Year Of Consumer Tech

The hottest news to start the week is who is not making the iPhone. Cisco Systems—not Apple—owns the name, and Cisco's going to use it as part of a desperate scramble to plug into the consumer tech explosion. It's a fitting way to wind down a year where the "consumer effect" dominated the tech agenda.

Cisco is using the name to launch a line of voice-over-IP phones from its Linksys division. Apple still still may launch a phone that includes iPod-like music functions. But what's more interesting is what this hubbub says about the role of consumer technology as the driving force of innovation and excitement in tech.

There was a time that Cisco fretted about tying its name too closely to consumer goods. How could Cisco risk its lavish premiums for business routers and switches by watering it down to peddle cheap consumer goods? Today, the risk runs the opposite way—what if by shunning the consumer, Cisco's brand loses its cache? "All of us understand the consumer is setting the pace in the electronic office," CEO John Chambers said in September , announcing a mass-audience marketing campaign for the Cisco brand. "We're clearly not doing the branding for the CIO."

InformationWeek put consumer tech on its magazine cover the second issue of 2006, warning that the distinction between consumer gadgets and business IT was shrinking, and that consumer tech was the innovation engine. We've returned to this "consumer effect" theme repeatedly this year, including urging central IT to not get too much in the way of employees experimenting with consumery, Web-based technologies.

Cisco's announcement is interesting all by itself, for what it says about voice-over-IP. It'll market the phone, which works with Skype and Yahoo Messenger, under its Linksys name, giving VoIP another channel into people's homes. Expect a lot more from Chambers in three weeks, when he speaks at the Consumer Electronics Show about Cisco's grand plans for putting itself at the center of the networked home.

Far more enjoyable, though, is to watch the inside-the-blogway disappointment that it wouldn't be Apple introducing the oh-so-anticipated iPhone, an idea that Gizmodo deftly describes as "built up by blogs and the mainstream press, to stand for the most highly coveted piece of vapor, ever." Compared with that, how can products from a mere $29 billion-a-year company be anything but a letdown?

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