Logitech set out to write software and ended up making a billion mice
The name Logitech comes from logiciel, French for software, and its founders began by writing a word processor for a Swiss client, who cancelled it. Their fallback was a small pointing device for a Japanese workstation. By 2008 the company had built its billionth computer mouse.
Two of the founders, Swiss-born Daniel Borel and Italian-born Pierluigi Zappacosta, met in electrical engineering classes at Stanford in the late 1970s, taught by professors including Ethernet inventor Robert Metcalfe. Back in Europe they recruited Giacomo Marini, a former Olivetti engineer, and founded the company in 1981 in Apples, a village in the Swiss canton of Vaud. Their first mouse, the P4 of 1982, was built on a design by Jean-Daniel Nicoud of the federal technology institute in Lausanne.
Much of the early business was invisible. From 1984 Logitech made mice for Hewlett-Packard at a factory in California, stamped with HP's name rather than its own. The same year it produced the first wireless mouse, which used infrared and needed a clear line of sight, so it struggled on messy desks. Only in 1991, with a radio-based model, did wireless catch on. Its first retail mouse, the C7 of 1985, cost 99 dollars; the S9 of 1989 was the first shaped to the hand and the first to carry the Logitech logo.
Webcams were the next big bet. In 1998 it bought the Connectix webcam division for 25 million dollars and released QuickCam, the first webcam with a built-in microphone; by 2000 it led global webcam sales. Later purchases pushed into audio and gaming, including Ultimate Ears, Astro Gaming, Blue Microphones and the streaming software maker Streamlabs.
Manufacturing followed costs, moving from Switzerland to California, Ireland and Taiwan and then to a large plant in Suzhou, China, opened in 1994. In Japan the brand is sold as Logicool. Hanneke Faber, formerly of Unilever, became chief executive in December 2023.
Source: Logitech
