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Intel's Software Chief Out; Botched McAfee Deal To Blame?
jfruh writes: Renee James, Intel's president and head of the company's software group has departed, supposedly to "pursue other opportunities." But a high-profile heir apparent doesn't just leave voluntarily, and it seems likely that she is in part taking the fall for Intel's acquisition of McAfee, the promised synergies of which have failed to materialize. Intel is a traditionally very stable company, but there's been a lot of churn in the upper ranks lately.
Fuck McAfee
Mod +5 Insightful because you know it is.
Why? The patriarchy.
I have been in this field for ages. I've dabbled in software as well as in hardware
This sentence says it all
Intel is a traditionally very stable company
In our field, 'traditionally very stable' is another of saying that the thing is stale
Look at Intel, for crying out loud. Has there been anything really interesting / exciting coming out from Intel for the past decades??
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
How to uninstall McAfee
I would just like to point out that the summary is incorrect. Renee was the head of Intel's Software and Services Division (SSG.) When she became company president she gave that role to the current SSG manager, Dong Fisher. However, the McAfee acquisition happened while Renee ran SSG, and she had a lot of influence on the decision.
To be fair though, the previous CEO (Paul Otellini) had the goal of wanting new revenue from software sales so Renee probably just tried to pick some existing company that had a good amount of stable revenue. A company like McAfee is one of the few that can get away with selling IT departments yearly support contracts and almost never have the CIO question renewing it every year. She also had to try to find something that could maybe, remotely tie in with Intel's chip business. I think one could easily argue that McAfee ties in better with a hardware company than say something like Intuit.
I honestly don't know anything about what happened, but I do know Intel is in the middle of a mostly job performance based layoff. My guess is that if she was let go for performance reasons then it probably had more to do with what she has done recently as President than what she did years ago.
That would be new one. Usually when an executive makes a bad decision, the executive responds by laying off a bunch of little folks.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
his infamous bath salts.
but the company?? Are you kidding me?
Dont act surprised when that re-org happens and you dont have a seat.
The reality is that James never fit in as Intel's president, and they are likely better off with her being gone.
Intel was and still is a hardware company first and foremost. The world's leading foundry and pretty good chip designers too. However James came from the side of Intel that handled software and services; she was a software person through and through. And while I disagree with TFA that the McAfee acquisition was a complete folly - it was a good fit for Intel's computer management technology development - it doesn't change the fact that it's but a small part of what Intel does.
Promoting someone likes James to such a high position in the company, overseeing both hardware and software, was a mistake. James was out of her element, and while she didn't do anything fatal, she lacked the background necessary to lead a hardware company like Intel. She would be better off at an Oracle or HP-like company, where software and services are a greater focus and her skills would be more applicable.
For some reason, in most companies the diversity officers (or whatever's their job title) seem to be the dumbest executives around. Seen more than a few examples. Probably not a big loss for Intel.
Answer is probably no.
Anyone with enough technological know-how to reboot a computer knows that McAfee is one of the worst things you can do to a computer. So even if Intel fully intended to throw out that bloated sack of excrement and recode it from scratch the reputation it has earned pretty well makes its brand worth negative money. If anything it would make intel look worse.
The only thing that made McAfee software was an evil business model. Thus Intel had two choices. maintain the evil business model to retain any monetary value from their purchase, or to abandon the model and forego any profits/revenues that McAfee would bring in.
To me the only value that I would see in McAfee would be to do a historical analysis to figure out how they became so broken so as to be able to form a checklist that Intel could use going forward to make sure that they never follow the same path.
My fear for Intel is that some psychopathic executives have made the jump from McAfee to Intel and are like ebola being released into a kindergarten. They will flourish and spread while leaving Intel a twitching bleeding from every orifice corpse. I could see Intel executives thinking themselves cunning where they do a huge deal so as to get closer the next promotion whereas a McAfee executive would falsify data to shut down an entire department so that he gets a slightly better parking space.
My fear for Intel is that some psychopathic executives have made the jump from McAfee to Intel and are like ebola being released into a kindergarten. They will flourish and spread while leaving Intel a twitching bleeding from every orifice corpse. I could see Intel executives thinking themselves cunning where they do a huge deal so as to get closer the next promotion whereas a McAfee executive would falsify data to shut down an entire department so that he gets a slightly better parking space.
Actually, that won't work at Intel: there are no assigned parking spaces there, and the executives have cubicles just like everyone else. The CEO has to park in the same parking lot that everyone else does, and fight for a good space with them. It's really a crappy company to work for if you're an executive who's used to generous perks like that.
That is a good analogy with Ebola and kindergarten though. Hopefully McAfee's evil execs won't get out into the rest of the company and ruin it.
As for McAfee's reputation, remember this is the company where their founder, John McAfee, has publicly called their product "the worst software on the planet". What kind of idiot would buy something like that? That would be like buying Microsoft products after Bill Gates himself ran around calling their products crap (not that he'd ever do that in real life), or buying Apple products after Steve Jobs (in an alternate universe where he didn't die of cancer) said that iDevices were the worst products on the planet.
I think your quote "the worst software on the planet" is missing some swearing and hookers.
As for the assigned parking spaces then the McAfee execs have two steps ahead of them. First get an assigned parking space policy, then they will be able to screw people out of their parking spaces.
I visited a company once where there was a long wide hallway that ran from one end of the main building to the other and a rabbit's warren of hallways that ran parallel. A few execs had card reading door locks installed on either end of the hallway and on every door that entered into the hallway so that only they could use it. I am talking about 12 people out of around 900. When some auditors(from a potential suitor) asked them about this they said that they often had meetings while they walked and needed the private space.
Prior to their little hallway coup there might have been a dozen people walking in that hall at any given time and it was actually packed during peak times such as lunch. After the lockout the other hallways were near mad max combat zones.
I was so sad when that company didn't manage to IPO as I knew their days were numbered. But their IPO efforts failed and the company slowly shrunk over the years. They still exist but maybe have 200 people working there.
The key being that these people were also scum of the earth and had all kinds of interesting techniques for making sales. One was that they were the exclusive regional salespeople of office gear for a couple of companies. The stuff had all these special connections and whatnot that were incompatible with everything else on the market. Their pricing was (making up the exact numbers) $1000 for your first unit, but $5,000 for your 500th unit. This way they would bid on government contracts and win the small ones. Then because of their exclusive product lines they would get "sole sourced" contracts from the government for all further office gear. This would completely end run the bidding process and for a long time they made boatloads of cash. Then the newspapers got wind of it and the whole thing came crashing down with all kinds of new rules about proprietary solutions not being preferred. But within the contracts themselves they had all kinds of little scumbag tricks. One was to outfit the office of the decision makers with a pile of crazy nice stuff but only for a "trial" run of a year or so. Keeping the "trial" going would be completely dependent upon further contracts which they had experts who would help the bureaucrat to "streamline" the entire purchase. i.e. Sole sourced.
I very much doubt that the McAfee people were any different and letting people like that into your building is begging for disaster. I suspect the terrible software was just a symptom of a completely degenerate company.
I think your quote "the worst software on the planet" is missing some swearing and hookers.
John McAfee is indeed a colorful character, but so was Steve Jobs. If he popped up tomorrow out of hiding, revealed that his death had been faked, and then proceeded to tell the world that Apple products are complete trash, what would that do to Apple's sales? Yet somehow, McAfee keeps selling their crapware.
I very much doubt that the McAfee people were any different and letting people like that into your building is begging for disaster. I suspect the terrible software was just a symptom of a completely degenerate company.
I totally agree. Unfortunately it seems like a lot of companies are run by people just like this. Evil sociopaths tend to climb to the top of many organizations. Though your office gear example seems especially bad.
I can be 100% sure that he is dead. Otherwise he would have come back and beat Ivy to death, not out of uncontrolled anger, but to prove a point that it is an oversized clunky pile of crap.