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Intel to buy McAfee for $7.7 Billion

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Re: Intel to buy McAfee for $7.7 Billion

#101

Post by Marticus »

azim wrote: post #89
Marticus wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And yes, true.

But for end-users that aren't behind a corp firewall / NAT / etc, this is an easy solution that they don't have to worry about.

Out of sight, out of mind (CPU cycles) sells, unfortunately.

Re: Intel to buy McAfee for $7.7 Billion

#102

Post by ajju »

loupgarou21 wrote: post #46
shadowfox wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is McAfee really that bad?

After buying Secure Computing and then discontinuing the SnapGear I know I'm not terribly happy with them.

Snap Gear was awesome. Used an SG565 for some research we were doing. Best wireless router/UTM I have ever owned.

Disclosure: Used to work for Secure Computing, but not the snapgear division.

Re: Intel to buy McAfee for $7.7 Billion

#104

Post by CamperBob »

napierzaza wrote: post #28
jakevoytko wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

McAfee also has strong UI programming expertise that Intel sorely needed. Intel's IPP and MKL libraries are absolutely great, but VTune looks like it is fresh out of 2002. They get access to several stable revenue streams (like antivirus), and can cherry-pick talent to work on whatever projects they want. There aren't many downsides for Intel.

7.7 Billion dollars for UI design? It seems strange that Intel is investing in this particular sector that leverages mostly Windows stuff. They should move out of Steve Ballmer's basement and make their own OS. Why do they want to make software for platforms when their competencies are on hardware? One that doesn't look like a antivirus program for Windows.

They should move out of Steve Ballmer's basement and make their own OS.

Yeah, that won't have antitrust implications, or anything.

Re: Intel to buy McAfee for $7.7 Billion

#105

Post by jsz0 »

Intel just bought Texas Instruments cable modem division so maybe they're looking to make a big push into the CPE market? x86 all-in-one gateways with embedded security & AV scanning perhaps? McAfee has tons of deals with ISPs so this would be a big foot in the door for Intel to push not only IP gateways but other types of set tops too. $7.7B is a big price tag but if my theory is correct you need to look at it in perspective of how many CPE devices are sold per year -- cable modems, routers, set tops. Presently they're all using ARM, PPC or MIPS chips. That's a huge potential growth area for low power x86. Wouldn't surprise me to see Intel pickup Motorola's set top business in the near future.

Re: Intel to buy McAfee for $7.7 Billion

#106

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Intel to buy McAfee for $7.7 Billion

#107

Post by protomyth »

instcode wrote: post #66
cryptoz wrote: post #2

Why would they do this? It seemed obvious to me than in 5-10 years Antivirus software would be obsolete and unnecessary. I hear people every day recommending Windows 7 users get Microsoft Security Essentials and nothing else. And personally I run Ubuntu, so I haven't thought about antivirus software in years... This seems like a very odd decision to me. Intel, a world leader in processor design, does not need to get…

Is McAfee really worthier than Sun? If IBM took a deal with Sun at that high, the Sun would have moved around the earth and Oracle doesn't stand a chance to slur the OS community!

Google != OS community

Re: Intel to buy McAfee for $7.7 Billion

#108

Post by mkr-hn »

netman21 wrote: post #96
mkr-hn wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Small dip??? Intel lost $3.5 billion in market cap on the news. McAfee gained $2.6 billion.

$3.5b is a big number, but it's only 3% of their market cap.

http://www.google.com/finance?client=ob&q=NASDAQ:INTC

Several other companies in that market went down a similar amount, so it doesn't seem to be extraordinary. I would expect a lot of tech investors to move their money to McAffe after that announcement hoping to get something out of it.

What matters is what happens after now. If it continues to go down for a long time, it might be a problem.

Re: Intel to buy McAfee for $7.7 Billion

#109

Post by melling »

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.

Oracle bought Sun for $7B. Sun sold out way too early.

Re: Intel to buy McAfee for $7.7 Billion

#110

Post by barrettcolin »

ashishbharthi wrote: post #88
mcknz wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This happened to me too just this past week; the only resolution was a full system restore. Pretty shocking.
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