Broadcom vs Microsoft

Broadcom Corporation is an American fabless semiconductor company in the wireless and broadband communication business. The company is headquartered in Irvine, California. Broadcom was founded by a professor-student pair Henry Samueli and Henry T. Nicholas III from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1991. In 1995, the company moved from its Westwood, Los Angeles, office to Irvine, California. In 1998, Broadcom became a public company on the NASDAQ exchange and now employs approximately 11,750 people worldwide in more than 15 countries.

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.