“Apple’s head of marketing, Phil Schiller, on Thursday told a court here that the iPhone was a “bet the company product,” and that now the entire company works on it in some way,” Shara Tibken reports for CNET.
“Schiller took the stand in a damages retrial against Samsung with only 11 minutes left in the session,” Tibken reports. “That gave him just enough time to introduce himself and talk briefly about his role at Apple, the development of the iPhone, and the event introducing the product. ‘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.'”
“He noted that Apple started working on the iPhone after it had already started iPad development. In the beginning, about 100 people worked on the smartphone. Now, ‘almost everyone’ at Apple works on the device,” Tibken reports. “The comments came on the third day of a retrial for damages that Samsung owes Apple for infringing on five of its patents through 13 of its devices.”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]