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.

Comments

Re:Fuck McAfee

[pop ebp]

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.

Re:Fuck McAfee

[AmiMoJo]

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?