Intel Closes $7.68 Billion McAfee Acquisition

[c2]

This is one of those deals that make absolutely no sense to me. Even less sense in fact then the Time Warner/AOL debacle.

Can someone explain any drop of rationale Intel might have for doing this? I am coming up empty.

[dmfdmf]

Perhaps Intel plans on giving the Mcafee virus scanner away for free. The resulting bogged down and slow computers would lead to increased demand for more powerful Intel CPUs.

/sarcasm

[statictype]

Intel CEO: I need some anti-virus. Can someone buy me McAfee?

Minion [2 hours later]: OK, Done.

[sajithw]

It's a long term investment to bring security down to the hardware level.

[corecirculator]

Long shot, but has it got anything to do with real estate? Intel and McAfee HQs are located within a mile of each other... again, its a crazy angle, just putting it out there.

[olalonde]

This was discussed on HN a few months ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1617186

[theklub]

This seems like a huge waste of money to me.

[lowglow]

Hm. I see this as a play for DRM locking things across the stack. Deep scan and data analysis software would be ripe for implementing this. Maybe I'm just paranoid.

[melling]

Sun went for less. Oracle sure got a great deal.

[thematt]

Probably more like Intel got a bad deal.

[vipivip]

I have come across persons who cannot remove McAfee from their machines.

[pjscott]

Maybe someone should start selling software to scan for such hard-to-dislodge software and remove it. An anti-anti-virus scanner.

[ojbyrne]

Story is 2 hours old and has a bad href displayed as text in the body of the article. Is there no quality control at techcrunch?

[flyt]

No.