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Intel to buy McAfee for $7.7 Billion

dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com

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Re: Intel to buy McAfee for $7.7 Billion

#81

Post by jbooth »

mkr-hn wrote: post #30
BrandonM wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're talking about $7.7 billion . I'm not sure it's quite as rosy a picture as you paint. I'm not that familiar with McAfee's annual profits, but even if they make $500 million a year, we can value the talent they cherry-pick at an absurdly high value of $1 billion, and it would still take Intel well over 10 years to recoup the investment, assuming stable revenue streams.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870447610457543... Intel's stock only took a small dip, and it looks like some of those who left were shifting it to McAfee to ride the wave as the stock went up. That's a lot of investors in an otherwise volatile market not jumping ship, so they must see something good in the deal that we're missing.

Either that, or stock market prices are much less connected to business fundamentals than one would hope.

Re: Intel to buy McAfee for $7.7 Billion

#82

Post by _delirium »

eru wrote: post #44
mnemonicsloth wrote: post #4

...for a 60% price premium. Right now, large companies have so much cash available to them, on such attractive terms, that acquisitions don't have to be a terribly good fit to be attractive. It's just time to buy.

How about paying dividends?

I think there's a bit of an agency problem on that one. Paying large dividends to return cash is sometimes a good choice for investors, but some executives, especially in tech, see it as some kind of failure: you're doing the opposite of an IPO, giving money back because you admit you don't know what to do with it! A bold new move is more interesting from an empire-building point of view.

Re: Intel to buy McAfee for $7.7 Billion

#84

Post by jbooth »

blantonl wrote: post #68
larsberg wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"advised by Goldman Sachs" Who wants to bet Goldman took a large, long McAfee position in the last couple of days? From an unrelated portion of the company, performing usual hedging activities, naturally :-)

You might want to brush up on the Glass-Steagall Act, which expressly prohibits these types of activities within organizations. i.e. ... "The Wall" And with Goldman under the regulatory microscope right now, I bet they are on the straight and narrow.

The glass-steagall act which was repealed in the late 90s and which many people point to as the key piece of deregulation that kicked off the housing bubble?

Re: Intel to buy McAfee for $7.7 Billion

#86

Post by jacquesm »

What we need is operating systems that are escalation attack proof, not hardware based anti-virus.

I was hoping something like this would break through:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability-based_security

Not that I've bought any anti-virus stuff since we stopped using Microsoft. In fact, the anti-virus stuff was a good part of the decision to quit using microsoft completely. It turned perfectly good computers in to space heaters.

Re: Intel to buy McAfee for $7.7 Billion

#87

Post by follower »

napierzaza wrote: post #65
eru wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really get how you can write: "They should move out of Steve Ballmer's basement and make their own OS." and "Why do they want to make software for platforms when their competencies are on hardware?" at the same time.

They're leapfrogging to a niche market of going from hardware to security on the Windows platform. What's the gain in getting into an specific platform's flaws (antivirus) and development environment? That's the corner of the platform itself, not to mention the scope of the OS industry. If they want to do software, they should develop a OS, maybe for Atom or some kind of mobile platform or otherwise. Antivirus is bac…

> If they want to do software, they should develop a OS,

> maybe for Atom or some kind of mobile platform or otherwise.

I believe that's MeeGo (http://meego.com/).

Re: Intel to buy McAfee for $7.7 Billion

#88

Post by ashishbharthi »

mcknz wrote: post #53
shadowfox wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is McAfee really that bad?

In April they issued an update that accidentally targeted legitimate Windows system files, causing the updated boxes to bluescreen. Astounding enterprise-level incompetence.

Oh yeah, McAFee has given blue screen to me many times. I bought Dell laptop for me and my gf. After McAFee free one year subscription expired, we decided to move to different anti virus. Once we uninstalled McAfee, both of our laptops got blue screens and crashed. My friend also had same experience with two of his computers.

Re: Intel to buy McAfee for $7.7 Billion

#89

Post by azim »

Marticus wrote: post #73
jakarta wrote: post #38

I think this is indicative of a real risk we will see with large corporations right now. Many of these large cap companies have huge cash hordes and are being pressured to do something with it. The risk is that the cash will be used stupidly to do poor deals and I think the market is indicating that this McAfee deal is a bad one. Their shareholders would have probably been better suited with a special $7B dividend in…

Not necessarily - I think it has the potential to be a very good move for Intel. I thought about my last post more, and I can think of a few applications where it could give Intel some huge advantages. Something that came to mind: We all agree that AV software eats CPU cycles. What's to say Intel can't just start putting custom hardware that is designed solely to offload signature checking onto a separate chip? With…

I think you're on the right track, but I don't believe this is about AV on the desktop. Enterprise-grade AV is a much bigger business, and tends to get pushed in to categories like IDS/IPS, web proxies, and email scanning. This all of happens "in the network" before packets ever hit your pc. It's extremely regex heavy, and in order to scan at high data rates we often rely on purpose-built regex accelerator cards.

Re: Intel to buy McAfee for $7.7 Billion

#90

Post by azim »

I don't think we'll see any change to AV on the desktop. That's not a fast-growing market. Enterprise-grade security "in the network" on the other hand is a multibillion dollar market, and growing fast. Signature-based detection is still the premier way of blocking threats like email spam and malware. In order to scale to the higher bandwidths that today's networks run at, it's necessary to use purpose-built hardware for network and regex processing.
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