The monster investment news that chip maker Intel is to buy up anti-virus company MacAfee for $7.7 billion is hardly going to affect the shape of digital media is it?
In so far as Intel has many of its major new initiatives in digital media and that this deal upsets many existing relationships in the overall technology eco-system, perhaps it does.
Intel is attacking set tops chips once again, and it bought the Texas Instruments cable modem business last week, and this shows that it is trying to change its shape. It is also re-investing in the cellular space both in software and in chips, and now this.
Does this mean that Intel is going to attack one of the things that has dogged its PC designs for decades, and embed some aspect of the MacAfee code into its hardware? There have been multiple initiatives to rest security on some embedded magic number on a chip, which might help trace spam to an individual PC and undermine most approaches to viruses, all in one go. Most of these moves have been resisted by other constituents within the industry, but given that the handset industry is already far more secure than the PC business, and considering that’s where the threat to Intel appears to be materializing from, perhaps Intel has decided to act. Any favoritism for MacAfee by Intel will no doubt raise the issue of anti-trust, but with ARM core designs representing a viable challenge to Intel as a processor designer, its dominance can no longer be taken as a given, and perhaps this deal will go through and do us all good making PCs and eventually set tops, that much more secure.
The deal represents a 60% premium on the McAfee share price when it was announced and the Intel share price slid back marginally on the news. Both boards of directors have unanimously approved the deal.