Fear as motivator: why Intel acquired McAfee Intel and McAfee made a surprise announcement early Thursday that the chip megamaker plans to acquire the security-software giant in a $7.68bn all-cash deal, and across the technical and financial communities, the response was a nearly unanimous "WTF?" But during a webcast conference with reporters and analysts, Intel CEO …
As far as I can tell, take overs that make no sense normally happen to:
- Line the pockets of the board of one company or the other
- Line the pockets of the major institutional investors of one company or the other
- Do nature's work - separate fools (read small investors) from their money.
It is quite likely that Intel was under pressure from its own institutional investors to spend some of its cash pile. I'd not be too surprised if some of these institutional investors also have a stake in McAfee. If Wall Street had no small investors, it would have no easy money take.
Intel are going for the sell fear move, selling via pushing effectively lock in into Intel only security features and they are looking to the so far ARM dominated embedded markets which have "explosive growth potential" (actually already are starting to explode), with the billions of devices.
Its basically what I said yesterday, (i.e. http://forums.theregister.co.uk/post/845847)
In their own desktop market Intel are playing a classic defensive marketing warfare strategy as this bolsters their desktop etc.. dominate position, but also as they don't dominate embedded markets they are playing a flanking marketing warfare strategy where they hope to lock in customers by fear (as they usually do) via x86 compatibility fears combined now with the new Intel only security feature fears, in doing so, it out flanks ARM to cut off their market without directly competing with ARM on performance. Intel are trying to corner and dominate the embedded market the way they dominated the desktop market. A big gamble but that's what they are playing for.
(You can see these marketing strategies listed here)...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketing_warfare_strategies
(They call it warfare as it borrows market dominance tactical concepts from warfare).
Frankly I utterly hate this Intel move. There is no way in hell Intel have got some magic fool proof hardware security feature so its all marketing spin to sell their products. Even if they have some new security feature history keeps showing someone will hack it sooner or later. So they are going to have to go for marketing spin to sell their products, which exactly what this buying McAfee move is all about.
They won't win over technical people as they can see through these mind games, not least because they can see how poor Intel are on battery life etc... so the target audience for this business move isn't technical people, its aiming to market at the much bigger non-technical people market using emotive means.
I'll leave the last word to the late great Bill Hicks again as he talks about exactly these marketing types in society...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDW_Hj2K0wo
Most of the posters here seem to have overlooked the wetware issue: anybody that can justify an action by saying, "The proposed acquisition...executes against .... [whatever] strategy" is clearly not capable of reasoned exposition, and is probably under the influence of a psychotropic substance. Maybe Intel's managers are just completely confused, but feel that they need to do something - whatever it might be - to justify their inflated salaries. This kind of managerial egomania has been observed recently among publicly quoted companies that are rescued soon after by the taxpayer.
... they had to buy Macafee? This is the company that makes software that you have to download a special tool from their website to remove. After you've Googled for the answer of why it can't be removed and then searched through their website to find it hidden away, of course. Naturally thisis beyond a lot of innocent users who will then end up paying for the software licence simply because the trial expires and they have to get rid of the alarmist warnings somehow.
What with the Dell-Intel shenanigans recently, one good thing about the merger is that it helps keep my list of Companies to Loathe nice and short.
This "security in silicon" shtick is a bit like trying to reduce car theft by incorporating security features into the roads, because the largest family saloon car vendor insists on shipping its cars with plastic everything, including some of the most baroque convoluted locks in the industry, that don't work to boot. People, there are better ways to do this, and golly gee there are other vendors that provide better cars that work on any old road.
"Security is top of mind for consumers" -- no it bloody well isn't. Do you see everyone cowering in a corner trying to not touch their computer? I see people click through every ill-conceived warning. They don't know what else to do, and the warnings certainly don't tell them anything useful so nobody ever reads those after the first. So they just ignore it. That makes this too marketing drivel for snake oil.
If this analysis told me anything it tells me this strategy has absolutely nothing to do with technical or technological merits. While it's de rigeur to over-spend on knee-jerk security measures for governments these days, I don't see what game intel thinks it's playing. Unless they're trying to one-two micros~1 with the fear game. But why bite the hand that feeds it so well? Or, since micros~1 obviously can't, did it ask intel to do the honours instead?
One more reason why my next PC will contain an AMD processor, just like the last two (the last Intel machine I owned had a 400MHz PII in it IIRC), and use effective, low signature AV software that doesn't cripple your system, like Avast!.
Intel may think that they have made a clever acquisition here. As evidenced by many of the comments above, people are still saying 'WTF?'.
An example of why I beleieve McAffe is such an awful piece of software: I have the misfortune of having McAfee installed on my PC at work, every week it slows my PC to a near-halt for half a day as it scans a mere 60 odd Gb of data for threats. Why does it take so long, when my home PC can scan a terabyte and a half, spread across several disks of varying sizes and ages, some on IDE and some on SATA, in about half an hour, using a free alternative? I fail to believe that the answer lies in hardware here, unless of course you take into account the fact that my work PC has 'Intel Inside', and my home PC does not...
Wow. The McAfee C-level management must be pinching themselves. What a dream come true for them. What golden handcuffs they have willingly donned.
As for Intel, why all a sudden they're a byword for security. Of course we'll be petitioning mobile device manufacturers to ditch speed+efficiency wizards ARM and rebuild their stacks on secure Intel tech.
All that wonderful good news, with results as early as the middle of the decade? That was well worth spending a third of your accessible capital resources.
Intel shareholders must be skipping for sheer joy at this unexpectedly exciting move. There hasn't been such a visionary move since Lotus focused all its efforts on getting 1-2-3 onto a windowing environment - OS/2 Presentation Manager.
Anti virus degrades performance. This makes a new (read profitable) chip in a Windows machine look about the same as last year's (or the year before) cheap old chip in a Mac/Linux/anything but Windows machine.
They can't improve on Windows apparent insecurity so they have to improve on the stuff people load up to deal with it. The only way they can do that is throw hardware at it. They haven't got any security themselves so they have to buy it.
ergo - Intel buys McAfee.
`Intel’s announcement that it will acquire software firm McAfee for a cool $7.68bn (£4.9bn) took the industry by surprise. However, it is now clear that the move was stimulated by aspirations to challenge British company ARM Holdings, which makes processors for the iPhone.'
http://www.computing.co.uk/computing/analysis/2268489/intel-looking-challenge-arm
... please buy a new 12-month liscence.
I was supremely annoyed when this occured to me whilst using McAfee Virus Scan. I couldn't believe that I couldn't continue to scan my PC using the virus-definitions I'd already downloaded & paid for. I felt like I was been forced to hand over the £££.
If my software had continued to scan then I might have considered updating at a later time, as it was I went elsewhere....
Then it has to be one F'd up question!!
Let's see, McAfee is the only AV package that I have ever used personally that has actually destroyed valid, uncorrupted data on my home PC (bye-bye email!!). And rolling it out at work has actually turned previously working laptops into high-quality doorstops. I know 2-3 people in my office that this has happened to.
So I guess that this is Intel's play to embed planned obsolescence into their otherwise rock-solid processors? I suppose that as McAfee firmware starts destroying productivity Intel will then come in and tell people that they need to upgrade to the next generation of processors with still more McAfee skunkware on it?
It does not make any sense at all to put AV as a hardware solution, because it will not be a hardware solution in any case, it always be software that analyses code, even if it runs on dedicated chips and circuitry.
It does not make any sense to run the "hardware" AV on Mac or Tux machines since the vast majority of malware is written for Windows.
It does not make any sense for Intel to buy a security (term used loosely in this case) company like McAfee which is losing trust and popularity amongst IT professionals. McAfee has not produced an efficient bit of software in the past 5 years. Bloated, slow and extremely complicated to manage.
Unfortunately, the consumer will be paying for this acquisition through higher processor prices.
Long live ARM, long live AMD.
What a disaster. At least with AMD/ATI you could almost see the synergy. The big problem being the merging was a disaster and put both companies a generation behind that took a few years to recover. The only good thing you can say about this purchase is at least Chipzilla still has more money than God so can absorb a few noob purchases.
""We also recently launched the Intel anti-theft technology, which will disable a computer if it's lost or stolen.""
Or you don't like the owner. That's essentially the same thing: Surveillance and remote disable at will.
Not of course the owners will, but Intels. Would you buy hardware which can be remotely shut down, permanently, with no question asked?
I wouldn't.
"We have concluded that security has now become the third pillar of computing," he told his listeners, "joining energy-efficient performance and Internet conductivity in importance."
Anyone else spot the irony there? That's right - get your device working on the internet, and only THEN think about security. Brilliant!
As for "embedded" use - As most (all?) of the McAfee stuff seems to be Windows-based, and Windows is probably the very worse OS you could use in an embedded environment, then it's a bit of a dead-end straight away, no?
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