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Broadcom was essentially bought by a private equity firm who took the name as the name of the umbrella corporation. Before that Broadcom was (and still is) one
by pavon 3y ago
Broadcom was essentially bought by a private equity firm who took the name as the name of the umbrella corporation.
Before that Broadcom was (and still is) one of the larger communication hardware companies, making chips for cell, wifi, bluetooth, ethernet and ARM SoCs, along with telecom and data center boxes that used these chips. You almost certainly have their hardware in some device you own. But they have always had difficulty competing with Qualcomm, arguably in part due to anticompetitive behavior from the later.
After the acquisition, they have been acquiring enterprise software companies to diversify, including CA Technologies (think Atlassian/Oracle of the mainframe world), Symantec, and now VMWare.
- antod 3y agoWow, I didn't know that. They even Computer Associated Computer Associates. That is like an exponential vortex of suck.
- gpvos 3y agoMaybe they absorbed a bit too much of CA culture.
- dredmorbius 3y agoI had totally missed CA being bought by Broadcom. Given that CA already had the reputation of "where software goes to die", this is ... bad news for VMWare. (I'd heard that description from many in the tech field, including from a CEO who's previous venture had been acquired by CA.) I also hadn't realised that Broadcom itself had originated at HP.
- pavon 3y agoBroadcom didn't originate at HP, it was an early 90's startup. What happened is that a private equity firm bought some parts of HP that had been spun off and then that company later bought Broadcom.
- dredmorbius 3y agoWikipedia (with cites to a Google Books link): The company that would later become Broadcom Inc. was established in 1961 as HP Associates, a semiconductor products division of Hewlett-Packard.[12] The division separated from Hewlett-Packard as part of the Agilent Technologies spinoff in 1999.[8][13] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadcom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadcom> Citing: <https://books.google.com/books?id=WAW5DwAAQBAJ&q=1961+broadcom+hewlett+semiconductor&pg=PT121 https://books.google.com/books?id=WAW5DwAAQBAJ&q=1961+broadc...>
- pavon 3y agoYeah, that wiki article is confusing. Broadcom Inc is the new company formed when Avago purchased Broadcom Corp, and Avago got it's start as a spin off of HP (by way of Agilent). However, the original Broadcom Corp is older than that and was unrelated to HP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadcom_Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadcom_Corporation
- dredmorbius 3y agoIt took me a couple of readings to get that right. Yes, it is confusing. Part of me thinks that corporate acquisitions and mergers should not be permitted to use prior names, and especially not to adopt the name of an earlier, non-ancestor parent. See AT&T and Lufthansa for a couple of examples.