Bosch vs Microsoft

Robert Bosch GmbH, or Bosch, is a German multinational engineering and electronics company headquartered in Gerlingen, near Stuttgart, Germany. It is the world's largest supplier of automotive components measured by 2011 revenues. Bosch's core products are automotive components, industrial products and building products. Bosch has more than 350 subsidiaries across over 60 countries and its products are sold in around 150 countries. In 2009 Bosch was the leader in terms of numbers of patents at the German Patent and Trade Mark Office with 3,213 patents.

Microsoft was founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen on April 4, 1975, to develop and sell BASIC interpreters for Altair 8800. It rose to dominate the personal computer operating system market with MS-DOS in the mid-1980s, followed by Microsoft Windows. The company's 1986 initial public offering, and subsequent rise in its share price, created three billionaires and an estimated 12,000 millionaires from Microsoft employees. Since the 1990s, it has increasingly diversified from the operating system market and has made a number of corporate acquisitions. In May 2011, Microsoft acquired Skype Technologies for $8.5 billion in its largest acquisition to date.