I didn't much understand Broadcom's aquisition of Computer Associates, nor do I understand buying Symantec.
Broadcom made its name (and fortune) in the late 90s as a fabless supplier of wireline and wireless communications transcievers and more recently embeded processors. How does a pure software business help them? Where is the synergy?
Companies tried to do this in the late 1970s by becoming conglomerates (for example, Gulf-Western bought Paramount pictures and Exxon bought some semiconductor manufacturers
The prospect is truly grim; but the only obvious combination I can imagine would be using Symantec/CA/Bluecoat's software to bring a new depth of black-box complexity to NIC firmware.
NICs already aren't a pure hardware affair, especially outside the cheap seats; you've got your TCP offload and iSCSI support(at the firmware level, obviously any NIC that isn't broken can handle iSCSI being run on top of it in software) and RDMA and so on.
If you have a bunch of Symantec and Bluecoat features to choose fr
Broadcom is a solutions company. The chips they make are just a part of what they sell - which is basically full turnkey solutions.
You don't buy a Broadcom chip off the shelf. You buy a chip and it comes with software to drive it. You won't get any documentation on how to drive that chip - heck, that documentation usually doesn't even exist in Broadcom. The software that gets written is because the software developer worked with the hardware designers to figure out how the thing was supposed to work.
This has been asked before in comments on a Symantec article, but here we go:
On 68k Mac, Symantec had two C compiler products: THINK C, which was a kind of "C with single-inheritance classes" known as Lightspeed C before Symantec acquired it in the takeover of THINK Technologies; and their home-grown Symantec C++. Apple eventually licensed Symantec C and Symantec C++ to replace their internally-developed 68k compilers in MPW (SC and SCpp commands). When the transition to PowerPC happened, Symantec's C/C++
That's all that Symantec sells. One of the big insurance companies would have been a better owner for it (Euro-translation: them).
I didn't much understand Broadcom's aquisition of Computer Associates, nor do I understand buying Symantec.
Broadcom made its name (and fortune) in the late 90s as a fabless supplier of wireline and wireless communications transcievers and more recently embeded processors. How does a pure software business help them? Where is the synergy?
Companies tried to do this in the late 1970s by becoming conglomerates (for example, Gulf-Western bought Paramount pictures and Exxon bought some semiconductor manufacturers
NICs already aren't a pure hardware affair, especially outside the cheap seats; you've got your TCP offload and iSCSI support(at the firmware level, obviously any NIC that isn't broken can handle iSCSI being run on top of it in software) and RDMA and so on.
If you have a bunch of Symantec and Bluecoat features to choose fr
Broadcom is a solutions company. The chips they make are just a part of what they sell - which is basically full turnkey solutions.
You don't buy a Broadcom chip off the shelf. You buy a chip and it comes with software to drive it. You won't get any documentation on how to drive that chip - heck, that documentation usually doesn't even exist in Broadcom. The software that gets written is because the software developer worked with the hardware designers to figure out how the thing was supposed to work.
This do
This has been asked before in comments on a Symantec article, but here we go: