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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.
How to uninstall McAfee
Look at Intel, for crying out loud. Has there been anything really interesting / exciting coming out from Intel for the past decades??
The Core micro-architecture was within the last decade and that was very interesting and exciting. Sandy Bridge was also a pretty good milestone.
Fuck McAfee Mod +5 Insightful because you know it is.
No, I won't. And no I don't.
It's two words that give no illumination on the subject. How do you suppose that enlightens anyone? Hint: your sexual preferences aren't interesting.
How about:-
I have no idea what the purchase price was for McAfee, or what it's existing revenue stream was/is - but I have to wonder whether the people that made the decision truly consider it's effect on Intel's image, and whether they costed a plan to turn around the scumbag image McAfee has. ?
Let's not forget the PCIe bus. Not to be confused with any of its predecessors (e.g. PCIx). It isn't so much a bus as it is a point-to-point store-and-forward network on the motherboard. Fully bidirectional with separate up/down lanes (e.g. no waiting to "turn the line around"). It is [IMO], the first bus they got truly right. It's even the basis of the latest SATA specs for SSD's.
Like a good neighbor, fsck is there
Fuck McAfee Mod +5 Insightful because you know it is.
How about the best free alternative to McAfee?
I've been using this product which appears to catch quite a lot of different viruses. Now, I'm not really an expert on viruses so it is possible that it false-flags innocent things and makes itself look *really* impressive to me without actually being really impressive. However I'm so impressed that I intend buying the full product. The McAfee crapware that came with the PC was raising alerts for things like "no internet protection" yet failed to find any viruses, while this product found quite a few on my PC that the default windows AV missed.
When it isn't sure about a file it uploads it (or maybe just a hash) to their server where it then compares with others who have the same file. Sometimes it comes back with "safe" for the files it uploaded, sometimes "still known" and sometimes "malware".
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
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
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.
360 Total Security IS MALWARE!!! Sorry, to tell you, but you've been had. And yes, it's pervasive in the Chinese market.
http://www.wiki-security.com/w...
Life is not for the lazy.
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.
Yes, quite normal for any AV to replace an existing AV application. Nothing new about this behavior. It's only foul-play if the users is not made aware of it. That's because you do NOT want to be running multiple AV programs at the same time. More often then not, the Windows kernel will freak-out and could throw a BSOD.
By the way, in a corporate deployment of managed anti-virus, existing AV programs get removed by the native uninstall routine of whatever is replacing it. A subsequent reboot is required to unload it from memory. It doesn't always go according to plan however, so IT sometimes has to do things manually and use a specific AV vendor's removal tool which pull out remnant files and registry entries left behind from a botched uninstall.
Life is not for the lazy.
They had new security features in their CPU's already. They needed partners in the security industry to integrate same.
McAfee was an early partner. Intel thought they did a reasonably good job at integrating the new features (prototypes of DeepCommand, etc.). At the time, Intel's hardware lines were saturating (except in mobile where they were still scrambling to catch up), they thought they'd done OK with the Wind River acquisition, so why not buy an evergreen cash generator of a software company? So they did.
Of course, it sort of borked their relationship with the rest of the security industry. And neither McAfee nor Intel really zoomed from the "synergy", but it's generated revenue for Intel so it wasn't an awful acquisition - just one Intel thought would do a lot more than it actually did.
Intel (Renee James included), never really got software. At their heart, they're a hardware manufacturing company. And that leaks all over the rest of the organization - hardware and software. The impedance mismatch between the manufacturing-oriented management and the software organizations are really too great to be overcome - software is a stretch too far (let alone their abortive attempts at consumer products, about which I shall make no further comment).
Intel should continue to acquire strategic software organizations, but leave them as independent operating entities. Because, as it is right now, Intel is simply the Roach Motel of software acquisitions.
That is all.
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.
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.