Slashdot Mirror
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.
What? This is the Chinese antivirus vendor that was caught cheating in antivirus tests not long ago.
In China, local antivirus software vendors have a reputation of being shady, often bundling questionable software and forcibly removing their competitors' software (imagine that!). I heard the "international" versions are less aggressive, but personally I still wouldn't let any of them near any of my computers. This is the first time I heard someone outside China using those.
I can never understand why people use or even buy antivirus software from not-so-trustworthy vendors when Microsoft offers one for free that is fast and effective.
Intel paid $7.68 billion for McAfee. While their consumer products are notoriously crappy they do actually have some cred for their business software. Most of their business is providing services to companies such as email archival, spam protection and anti-virus. Software as a Service as they call it, or running an external mail server as the rest of us would say. They make high end encryption products too, that have all the various certifications needed for government work.
It's still not really clear what Intel hoped to gain by buying McAfee... Did they want in to those markets, or were they hoping to add new security features to their CPUs?
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Intel had made a big investment in enterprise chipsets with features like VT and AMT. They were hoping to speed up enterprise hardware refresh rates for a decade or so by continuing to provide highly compelling enterprise features in hardware.
One area they thought held particular promise was security. They were interested in AV companies leveraging a combination of VT and AMT to provide a more secure environment-- basically they wanted to see host-based security technology live outside the end-user's OS, but still reach in to detect and protect. That way, if a box did get popped, you could still update signatures, etc and have some reasonable hope that you could actually repair the OS without wiping it. Lots of other little bits in the vision.
The big problem for Intel was that they needed security vendors to build and sell software on top of this platform. But it was a bit of a "chicken and egg" problem, where there wasn't enough of a hardware footprint to justify a product investment, and so there wasn't enough compelling reason for people to pay extra for the hardware.
Intel pushed most A/V companies hard for some investment in the area, and McAfee actually did peel off a SMALL team to work on it (quite possibly the best engineering team w/in McAfee actually). They spent maybe a year making some good progress, and then when DeWalt was trimming down to save costs, that team got cut.
I'd heard that Intel was enraged. I can imagine them thinking they needed to control their own destiny-- get the security software built that they thought would drive faster hardware refreshes. McAfee had been the most amenable, and was definitely primping itself to be acquired.
By the way, McAfee does NOT own PGP. They'd spun it back out, and it got re-acquired by Symantec.