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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

TIL (I think?): Avago is the spun-off semiconductor division of Agilent, plus LSI and Emulex (minus, it seems, all the parts of those businesses that don't produce chipset products).

I think? this makes Avago the largest chipset vendor.

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TIL too. My response was: "what the heck is an Avago and how is it big enough to buy Broadcom?!"

I don't really get the trend of taking well-established brands and changing their name to something nobody recognizes. This gets me all the time with Leidos too (i.e. SAIC).

Well, to be fair, that's not really what happened. HP spun off Agilent to focus on end-user general IT products. Agilent was a giant hairball of a company. PE firms stripped the chipset and component divisions out of the hairball, called them "Avago", refined the business down to chipsets and away from general components, and executed a roll-up strategy on the chipset space.

What would make sense would be for Avago to do a VW/Audi or Cingular/ATT thing and assume Broadcom's branding.

I'm not sure that the "Agilent" branding does a whole lot more for a chipset business than "Avago" does.

Also: I'm guessing if you're an Avago customer, you know it. :)

Similarly: Leidos isn't really SAIC, but rather the spun-off "national security" IT products part of SAIC.

It would be interesting to try and make a graph of the product lines / companies in this space. I.e. HP started off doing test equipment, and back in the 90s spun that division and everything not related to computers/storage/printers to Agilent. Agilent has since spun off:

  * Phillips Medical Systems: health care
  * Avago: Semiconductors
  * Verigy: Semiconductor test
  * Keysight: Test equipment

+ Probably more I don't know about due to acquisitions.

I still can't believe they went with the Keysight for their T&M group. Such a horrible name.

AFAIK Philips Medical Systems isn't a spin-off, but existed before and bought the health parts of Agilent.

The graph would be even more complex if you trace all the part acquisitions and divestitures in and out of Avago (LSI, PLX, Infineon, Axxia, SSD tech to Seagate, Emulex).

Then again, Broadcom liked to buy things, for example ServerWorks, Renesas, Netlogic (which in turn had acquired RMI, etc).

Big fish, little fish, ad infinitum.

From TFA: "After the deal the combined company would be named Broadcom, sources close to the deal told Reuters."

Whoah. Missed that. That makes a lot of sense.

So what I've also learned is that I never needed to understand WTF "Avago" was. It's like something stuck in the middle of the evaluation stack of an expression parser.

Hah, kind of like when Rackables became SGI.

Wait, what?

Rackables bought SGI (Silicon Graphics) and then renamed themselves "SGI".

It was a sad day.

This is just stupid. Rackable was already way better known brand in datacenters/cloud than SGI. Who nowadays even remembers SGI?

HPC customers, so I assume that's Rackable's target market.

Fine, fine...when NeXT was paid to take over Apple, if that helps you feel better. :)

...or when one 'Tera Computer Company' bought what was left of Cray from SGI, renamed itself Cray Inc., and released reworked versions of existing products under the Cray name.

Avago paid for it with about 50% stock 25% cash and 25% new debt, so no Avago does not actually have enough money to straight up buy Broadcom. It is more like a merger than an acquisition.

And Comcast...err Xfinity.

And Phillip Morris...err Alcoa.

Philip Morris became Altria, not The Aluminum Company of America. :)

(Altria has the distinction of being the most Orwellian brand in all of American commerce).

Why is that?

Because they are the polar opposite of altruistic. Video + summary: http://www.rollingstone.com/tv/videos/watch-john-olivers-epi...

Comcast is worse than zero brand, it's a brand associated with poor customer service. Xfinity is an attempt to rebrand.

There's that, and also the fact that Xfinity is a triple-play brand, and people have a very strong association between "Comcast" and "Pay TV", which makes it more difficult for that brand to also sell telecom service.

They don't actually sell all that many things under the Avago brand, which may be why you haven't heard of them. They sell optocouplers, optical mouse sensors and some other optoelectronics, some RF stuff, and that's about it. I had heard of them before, and my reaction was basically "wait, Avago as in the optoelectronics company that spun out of HP?"

I am not sure that I understand what you mean with chipset vendor? In my view both Intel and Qualcomm are chipset vendors as well a "solution" consisting of multiple chips. Usually this is indicated in their reference platforms. For Intel that would be the CPU and the motherboard and for Qualcomm that would be their handset reference platform.

Aside from that, the new company will be really big even after divisions have been sold off.

One thing I'd love to see one day would be a timeline/lineage graph of (silicon valley) tech companies. It is pretty colorful how the companies have variously both spun off and merged while still maintaining relatively strong history that usually can be traced to few key places (e.g. Fairchild)

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