Intel Buys McAfee 377
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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Intel Buys McAfee
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He has not acquired a fortune; the fortune has acquired him. -- Bion
Why? (Score:1, Interesting)
The press release is fluff (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:All part of their core business (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Why? (Score:3, Interesting)
I was really hoping they'd be buying them out to shut them down.
one can only hope, anyway.
beyond that though, is there really some benefit here or is this just to "make sure it works better on intel" or something?
I didn't imagine security research from mcafee is any better internally than intel just working with them anyway.
Re:Lycos part deux (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Holy cow (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Goal: boost need for per clock cycle performanc (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
McAfee haters? there is more to this deal... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Holy cow (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Holy cow (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:mcafee corporate is better then the home ver (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [slashdot.org]
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?
How Far They've Come (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
They bought McAfee so they can keep Dell away from (Score:4, Interesting)
OMG you figured it (Score:3, Interesting)
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!!!
Re:Why? (Score:5, Interesting)
Intel did it to fire someone (Score:3, Interesting)
If remember the McAfee bug [slashdot.org] 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.
Re:Why? (Score:3, Interesting)
I guess I've never used McAfee from a home end user perspective, but from a corporate perspective it is a pretty solid product. The client-side agents are extremely resilient, you could have a box powered off for a year tucked away in some dark corner of the office, fire it back up, and it would check in and update just fine -- that is hugely important. Yeah, [full] system scans eat up a lot of CPU, thats why you effectively set your policies (which are pretty damn granular) to scan at certain times, disregard certain file types, etc... so that it doesn't impact the business. Schedule full system scans during the week ends and during scheduled maintenance windows. On-Access scanning is enabled, and I'll admit you can see it chews up a decent amount of proc for compressed file types. But I feel McAfee (again,from a corporate perspective) delivers a pretty nice suite of products. From my experience, the only thing that is a bit lacking (which is seemingly because it's in its infancy stages) is the Endpoint Encryption. Integration with fingerprint readers is somewhat lacking, many common biometric co-processor models are not yet supported, also, even if they are supported, managing the tokens and linking them to user accounts on the server-side is pretty manual. It's a bit silly... but they are making progress in that area.
Either way, there's no denying that McAfee is a major player in the AV scene... and since Intel already damn near has the market cornered on CPU/Motherboards/etc... Imagine how much integration can be done at the hardware level between AV/provisioning/inventory/imaging/etc using TPM/IAMT. I don't see how any of this is a bad thing.
Home computing is not the bigger market here.