ray_gillespie

The world's biggest computer chip manufacturer, Intel, has announced that it will be acquiring anti-virus and security technology firm McAfee for $7.68 billion (£5 bn).

With security becoming a higher and higher priority for manufacturers and consumers, particularly with the explosive growth of smartphones, GPS and other hi-tech devices in the last few years, Intel clearly sees the security industry as a place of growth.

Dave DeWalt, McAfee's president and CEO, underlining the importance of modern security software, said the following:

"The cyber threat landscape has changed dramatically over the past few years with millions of new threats appearing every month."

The deal still needs to be approved by the necessary shareholders and regulators but has been unanimously approved by the boards of directors for each company.

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perris

I don't know anyone who actually uses mcafee

I wonder if they plan on improving the program

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Johnny

I tried McAfee a couple of times. It wasn't bad till they put all the bulk and crap in it. It started to become worse than Norton ...

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ray_gillespie

Yeah - the clever thing to do would be to release it for free without the crap and then trick foolish people into buying the full software suite - much like AVG do.

Personally, I have despised McAfee for years now but I would definitely consider using it if they cut all the crap out and released it for free.

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Aprox

McAfee is used primarily in corporate environments in my experience. It does not get a lot of face time to the public, but is still very much a mainstream AV solution.

Johnny

There is no denying that, Aprox. But, I agree with what Ray said. I think that if they would take the bulk out and do like AVG or Avast!, it would do better in the main stream market.

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Aprox

We use the corporate version of McAfee here at my work (think the people who just bought McAfee..) and it's actually pretty light weight. It has a streamline UI with no extra graphics, just standard windows UI style, etc and it's only using 28MB of system memory atm. Not bad?

Johnny

That isn't bad. They should change it around a little bit, and make a version like it for regular users.

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Xie

You really only hear about McAfee anymore when they have a botched update that deletes systems files and blue screens all the Corporate Windows boxes. Not sure anyone outside of business runs McAfee due to clunk and sad detection rate.

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Aprox

I remember that day as if it was yesterday... I came into the office and the first thing I noticed was that there was a line leading up to the IT department about a mile long... I get to my cube and sure enough all of my systems and coworkers system all hosed. I spent all day figuring out a fix.. (or systems use drive encryption so you can just swap them to another system)

Later in the day I was walking across campus with a USB key with the files & script needed to fix the problem when I once again see the line at the IT desk. For a moment I thought I could help those poor guys out and help a few people in the line... but then I realized that if I did that I'd probably get overrun and be there all day... haha... so guilt ridden I walked away with the *key* to salvation.