Phil Schiller: There Were Huge Risks (iPhone); It Was A ‘Bet-The-Company’ Product

The Apple vs Samsung re-trial is in full swing with Apple’s attorney demanding an additional $380 million in damages from Samsung. This is in addition to the $600 million Samsung already has to pay after being found guilty of infringing the Cuperitio-based company patents last year.

On the other hand, Samsung’s legal team believes the company only owes $52 million, despite admitting for the first time that they did infringe some of Apple’s patents.

According to a report from CNET, Apple’s head of marketing, Phil Schiller, told the court last that Apple risked everything to bring the first iPhone to the world in 2007.

“There were huge risks [with the first iPhone],” he said. “We had a saying inside the company that it was a ‘bet-the-company’ product…We were starting to do well again in iPod…Then here we’re going to invest all these resources, financial as well as people, in creating this product.”

I highlighted this point in this piece – Here Is The Most Fascinating Tale of The First iPhone You Will Ever Read.

In his book – Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution,  Fred Vogelstein said:

The iPhone project was so complex that it occasionally threatened to derail the entire corporation. Many top engineers in the company were being sucked into the project, forcing slowdowns in the timetables of other work. Had the iPhone been a dud or not gotten off the ground at all, Apple would have had no other big products ready to announce for a long time. And worse, according to a top executive on the project, the company’s leading engineers, frustrated by failure, would have left Apple

This is the biggest reason why I have a lot respect for Apple as an innovative company. It’s also really disappointing that all this hard work appears to be in vein. Competitors are using the company’s IP, to make billions in profit and only wishes to pay $50M in return.

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