> Honestly it is the first time in my life that I hear the association computer science - Switzerland..

Some names you might recognize:

* Niklaus Wirth (Pascal, Modula-II, Oberon etc.; retired professor at ETHZ)

* Jurg Gutknecht (Oberon; EHTZ)

* Erich Gamma (one of the "Gang of Four" behind the Design Patterns book; co-wrote JUnit; studied at University of Zurich)

* Urs Hölzle (Google SVP of Technical Infrastructure at Google; studied at ETHZ)

A lot of people can also be traced back to Wirth. E.g. Andreas Gal that did his thesis on trace trees for JIT compilation is German, and did his thesis at UC Irvine, but his advisor was professor Michael Franz who did his thesis on runtime code generation before Java was released under Niklaus Wirth.

> A lot of people can also be traced back to Wirth.

Martin Odersky, the creator of Scala and javac, was born in Germany but received his PhD in Zurich, at EHTZ, under Wirth's supervision[1]. Odersky is now a professor in Lausanne at EPFL [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Odersky

[2] https://people.epfl.ch/martin.odersky/bio?lang=en&cvlang=en

I was clearly speaking about companies. In uk there is (was until one month ago) Arm holdings, in Silicon Valley I guess you should know, Samsung should be quite famous in the world, Sony and all the other Japanese companies the same. Which big software/hardware company famous in all the world I'm missing in Switzerland?

I was responding to the association with computer science.

In terms of companies, here's a few of the best known I'm aware of:

An old infamous one:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_AG

And a couple of major international ones:

* Logitech (founded in Apples, Vaud)

* STMicroelectronics (headquartered in Geneva; though it was a merger of a French and an Italian company)

And a new but still quite well known security hardware one:

* Silent Circle (security hardened smartphones)

But as other have pointed out, in software/hardware Switzerland is doing best in R&D, not least because of the high salaries, and a lot of CS grads will also end up going into jobs in companies that are not necessarily hardware/software companies but that need a lot of CS talent (e.g. banks, high tech manufacturing).

The swiss are very strong in biotech. Consider that Genentech, Silicon Valley darling of biotech, is now owned by a Swiss company.

Because you have no interest in micro-mechanics or manufacturing machines? ETH and EPFL are one of the best universities in the world for CS. No one else than yourself is responsible for your own biases.

I don't care if you have the best university in the world. I was speaking about companies and there is no hardware/software world-leading class company in Switzerland that I know. I still didn't see one in all the comments and no down voter provided one single example.

Also pharma/biotech: Novartis, Roche, Synthes...

Pharma is obviously well developed in Switzerland, but what has to do with hardware/software companies?

You will not find companies producing hardware in Switzerland (apart maybe of Logitech). This would be much to expensive, but there are a lot of companies which have their R&D departments in Switzerland.

Also Switzerland strengths, like Germany, is not rooted by the big companies. The small to medium sized companies are the backbone of the success. And naturally those are not as known as an Apple or Samsung.