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Intel Buys McAfee
Several readers have noted that
Intel has agreed to buy McAfee, the computer antivirus software maker, for about $7.7 billion in cash. There is also a press release available if you are into that sort of thing.
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Just diversifying their portfolio or are there other objectives at work?
100% marketing fluff. I really, REALLY want to know what happened under the table, what's still happening under the table, what McAfee has that 15 cheap startups don't, and how this is going to affect Intel hardware in the future.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
Or, they plan to make it even slower, and encourage users to upgrade their processors!
Possibly, but I suspect that Intel might be after patents. While McAfee is crap software, it wouldn't surprise me if they had some patents that could help Intel with putting better anti-virus protection into their processors or adding acceleration for heuristics.
Why would the existence of MS Security Essentials possibly convince Intel to shell out billions to get in on that action?
AV, as it stands, is basically a thankless, reactive chore, with the occasional destructive false positive to brighten your day. Now that Microsoft has come out with a competent(by the standards of the industry) and unobtrusive(by the standards of the industry) free offering from a trusted (if you are running Windows, clearly you trust them to some degree) name, the only gold left in home AV is fool's gold.
There is still some cash to be had in corporate AV, since MS ain't exactly giving ForeFront away; but what would a company whose software experience consists largely of compilers, drivers, and the occasional linux project want getting in there?
And, even if they do have some clever plan involving leveraging their Intel AMT motherboard stuff, why McAfee? There are plenty of smaller, presumably cheaper, outfits that are at least as competent, many more so, and the brand name won't matter once Intel starts using theirs. One imagines that they could have gotten Kaspersky for half as much, if that.
Color me confused.
Although it's a CPU hog, that doesn't matter much because [last I looked at it] the scanning process is single-threaded and every CPU has at least two cores nowadays.
:)
The main performance drag is its never-ending HDD thrashing. Constant random reads are murderous for HDDs.
Of course, Intel also make SSDs, which don't suffer quite so much from that.
Wow, I'm really surprised at this announcement and that Slashdot still has my account on profile. Good jobs on keeping that database!!!
But seriously folks. Bashing McAfee? Are you ignorant to exactly what McAfee is? The largest AV player in the Government/Military sector. They have very large banks as customers too. But, I know it is more fun to joke about their AV performance, which is in fact on par with most AV products.
So let me get to the business of trying to decide what this means? It is without a doubt a huge plus for Intel. They have entered into SaaS/cloud email arena with MxLogic, now have a viable FW in the Sidewinder. Can be knocking on checkpoint's gate with a EndPoint Encryption product, is the DLP solution going to rival RSA? Intel gains other network based tools such as IPS/IDS (reconnex), Network Behavioral Analysis, Foundstone, etc.
I say the deal doesn't go through. At least, getting this past federal regulators will be quite an interesting test.
"Work" is not a stressor. It is the "perception" of work that is the stressor.
I don't get why intel would buy a software company in the first place, much less one that makes not-so-great antivirus software. Seems to me they should have put that huge wad of cash into R&D.
You apparently have too much sense and knowledge to be one of today's "IT Executives". As I look around I have to say, "Is this the best we can do?"
Yeah. No unnecessary SVChost.exe http://tech.slashdot.org/story/10/04/21/1735211/McAfee-Kills-SVCHostexe-Sets-Off-Reboot-Loops-For-Win-XP-Win-2000
Given that McAfee "Oopsie" actually shutdown Intel operations for a day, maybe they do want to take it out back, and put it out of its misery?
20 years ago when I got my first modem (wow it's been that long, I feel old) McAfee was *the* virus scanner. Sysops used it to scan uploads and users used it to scan downloads. Of course back then it was a small command line app that fit on one floppy and ran in 256KB (yes, K) of memory, not the massive piece of bloatware it is now. It was also free... paid versions didn't appear until Windows took over IIRC.
Never would have guessed that they woulda end up developing into a software giant worth $7.7B. And sold to Intel of all companies.
Heard a guy on the business channel speculating that Intel might be wanting it to develop on-chip virus scanners. Sounds like a promising application if it'll speed it up. As it is now scanners as no faster now as it was 20 years ago, but back then we only had 30MB drives to scan so it ran a full scan in under 30 seconds. Now we have 300GB or more and it takes about 3 hours... no wonder people hate virus scanners.
Instead of giving Dell cash to stay away from AMD (which is frowned upon), they will give away McAfee licenses. It's that simple.
1) Buy the worst performing AV on planet ever
2) Hand it out for free or some cheap price
3) Let them NEED your CPU upgrades!
4) Profit!!!
If remember the McAfee bug from a few months back, Intel was hit by this bug and shutdown their network. Maybe Intel is forking over the cash to fire whoever screwed up at McAfee and caused this problem.
Its not what it is, its something else.